Robles was doing what Changó had told him to do. He ordered Renata’s room locked and he kept the key and stayed all night in an office next to the torture room. At sunrise they brought her breakfast and more ice and at nine her mother was allowed to see her in the office and take her home on her arm, with Robles offering deferential bows to Celia who thanked Colonel Robles for his kindness and walked Renata to the car.
Diego had warned her that the police are liars, so do not trust anything they say or do. In the car her mother was saying her father had booked her on a flight to New York, she would stay with her cousin and have all the money she needs. She would be off the island tomorrow. But Renata had other plans. She told her mother to use her connections to get her into the Haitian embassy where she would seek asylum, also the Brazilian and Ecuadoran embassies, for her father knew the Brazilian military people and the Ecuadoran ambassador was in love with her; so she would have three safe places to go. Her mother insisted New York was safest and Renata said yes, but I will never get there, do what I ask, Mama, or they will kill me, not all the police are as afraid of me as Robles is. They will be coming for me very soon.
When they arrived home her mother drew a bath for her and examined her wounds and put Furacin salve on all of them, and wept when she saw what that devil did to her ears. He made her a deaf person. She said she would call a doctor but Renata insisted they call everybody they knew with clout to get her into one of the embassies. She went up to her room and packed five kinds of medicine, her passport, two blouses, two skirts, her makeup and sundries in an overnight case, tiptoed down the back stairs and heard her father talking on the phone about the Brazilian embassy.
She went out the French doors and through the garden, past the bougainvillea to the bus stop on Fifth Avenue, trying not to look like herself, and waited six months for the bus. Then she climbed its two steps feeling great pain in her ribs, god knows how many are broken, and why hadn’t they pained her this way going up the stairs to her bedroom?
She shuffled toward the rear of the bus and put on a mantilla to hide her face and hair, and sat facing away from the window. She rode to Twenty-second Street and walked two blocks to the Haitian embassy, a two-story building at Twenty-second and Seventh Avenue where, she had heard two weeks ago, six rebels from Matanzas had found asylum. But now the corner was full of police cars and policemen were surrounding the embassy, something going on and she would not stay to find out what. She walked back to Fifth Avenue, every step a dagger in both her sides. She waited for a bus that would take her to the Brazilian embassy, which occupied suites in a nine-story office building on the corner of Infanta and Twenty-third at the Malecón. She told the guard she was the ambassador’s niece but at the entrance to the embassy’s suite she felt that she could not take another step. The door opened to her and she stared at a young man who looked like a diplomat in training. He welcomed her and gestured for her to enter. She tried to make the step across the threshhold but she could not move. She dropped her bag and swooned into the young man’s arms.
Had she gone to the Haitian embassy forty minutes earlier she would have met two of her friends who had taken part in the Palace attack, Carbó and Prieto, and Javier from the 26th, one of the killers of Quesada at the Montmartre. Two safe houses where the three might have gone had turned out to be under surveillance, pinpointed by captured rebels who had been tortured into revelation, and so the three went to where the six Matanzas revolutionaries had found a haven. The three had four pistols among them and refused to surrender any until they had received safe conduct. They sat in a first-floor room while the Haitian diplomats considered their future. Within less than an hour their arrival had reached the ears of the chief of the Cuban National Police, Rafael Salas Cañizares, who swiftly assembled a task force and alerted the news photographers who documented his front-page arrests, that he had found the gangsters who might have killed Quesada.
Salas marched his troops into the embassy, flouting the international convention that protects asylum seekers, slaughtered the Matanzas six and exchanged fire with the three newly arrived armed rebels, who all fell. One policeman was wounded. Salas, who could have served as a body double for Oliver Hardy, strode into the first-floor room and stood over the fallen trio, his lower belly and groin bulging under his trousers below the edge of his bullet-proof vest. Javier, dying on his back with a privileged vision of this exposure, slightly elevated his right hand, which still held a machine pistol and, with terminal energy, fired his last shot into the center of the puffcake. The police chief joined the fallen, lingered two days in a hospital, and died.
Within an hour of Renata’s arrival at the Brazilian embassy the Cuban police knew she had found asylum, but the international outcry against Salas’s contravention of protocol kept them from a second invasion. Renata announced to her soul that she would make a pilgrimage to Babalu Aye to thank him and his brother for their vigilance on her behalf.
Quinn had just been served his reheated chicken dinner when he saw Gloria threading her way across the DeWitt ballroom to report that Roy’s bail was the expected five thousand. Renata and Max left the table with her and walked toward the lobby where Quinn imagined Max in a shadowy corner counting off the five in cash and passing it to his daughter to liberate a young man whose intimacy with her helped liberate her into near suicide.
From a lobby phone Renata called her contact in New Jersey, Cuca, whom she’d known since childhood but never knew her politics, but who had worked for Fidel in Havana until she was marked, then fled to Miami where she raised money for Fidel; and after the revolution she stayed on with Fidel’s extended intelligence family. Cuca said it was a go for Renata’s unnamed friend. He drives to Plattsburgh and leaves his car where Avis can pick it up. He meets his driver and they go twenty miles to the ruins of Fort Montgomery in Rouses Point. Max walks north through a cattle pasture and thin woods, not half a mile, and he’s in Canada. His driver crosses the border on 9-B which turns into Canadian route 223 and meets Max north of the Customs House. They drive two days to Gander and Max pays the driver one thousand dollars, then flies to Havana.
“I can’t lug my suitcase through that,” Max said.
“Travel light, leave it here,” Renata said.
Max walked her out of lobby traffic, down an empty hallway.
“That bag is full of money,” he said. “It was insane to carry it all, but when I heard they’d raided Alfie and were looking for me, I was gone in ten minutes. Your contact may be getting me on the road, but this money could get me into Cuba. Fidel doesn’t do charity work.”
“If you give it to Fidel how will you live?”
“I’ll keep a few bucks. He wouldn’t want an americano on the dole down there.”
“Is this Alfie’s money?”
“I made it through him. But it’s mine.”
“How much money are you talking about?”
“Nine hundred thousand, plus. I didn’t have time to count it.”