She stopped to take a breath and Willie nodded in commiseration.
“My father died several years ago and my mother is a widow. I understand. Go on.”
She stared off across the park. “Finally, we and an older lady friend convinced her to get out of the house. She started to go for walks and lunches with this friend. And eventually this lady even convinced her to go to the community center for the elderly here in Little Havana. People meet there to play dominoes and canasta, or just to talk. I can’t tell you how relieved my sister and I were when this happened. We had been worried sick for months about her and now we finally saw her coming back to life.”
“Well, that all sounds good.”
Ursula rolled her eyes. “Yes, it was too good. One day she was at the community center playing dominoes when a man sat down at her table as part of the foursome. His name is Norman Cruz. He is a man in his sixties, about ten years younger than my mother. He is handsome, tall, well built, just as my father was. He told my mother that he had come from Cuba only recently. When my mother asked him why it had taken him so long to leave the island, he told her it was because he had been held for more than twenty years as a political prisoner in Castro’s jails and had only recently been released.”
She fixed on Willie.
“You can easily imagine what that meant to my mother. She despises the Castros and here was a man who had lost twenty years of his life because of his courageous opposition to them. She was dizzy with admiration for him.”
Willie nodded. He had grown up in the Cuban exile community as well and knew that former political prisoners were greeted in Miami like heroes returned from the wars. There was no greater position of honor in the exile world. But Ursula wasn’t finished with her tale.
“From one moment to the next, my mother was in love with this man. She had missed my father so much and now God had sent someone to take his place. They started spending almost all their time together and now, just six weeks after they met, my mother has announced that they are going to be married next month. We have no idea who this man is, Mr. Cuesta. My mother is a woman of some wealth and at a very vulnerable stage of her life. We need to make sure she is not simply being taken advantage of.”
“So you need me to do background checks on his Norman Cruz.”
She looked pained. “We have a family lawyer and he has tried to do that. But the Cuban government won’t give any information on who was or wasn’t a political prisoner.”
That didn’t surprise Willie. Governments, in general, didn’t admit to having political prisoners at all. Everybody in jail was catalogued as a common criminal.
“And the lawyer has also tried to get information here locally,” Ursula said. “There is an organization of former political prisoners here, but they admit they don’t know everyone ever held in those prisons. Dozens of detention centers exist all over the island. They found an old listing in human-rights records of an N. Cruz, but nothing else about him. This man Cruz says he was held in a small facility in the city of San Sebastian on the eastern end of the island. The lawyer found that there is a detention center there, but he could find no one else who was detained in that facility and who might know Cruz.”
“How about members of Cruz’s family? Most exiles have family here. They would have information about him.”
Ursula shook her head. “He says he was an only child, that his parents died when he was young, and that he lost touch with other relatives while he was in prison. He has no one here.”
Willie soaked that all in. He was starting to comprehend Ursula’s plight.
“So you need someone who can size this guy up — get enough out of him to determine whether he’s on the up and up.”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
Willie stared at the elderly woman propped in the chair, then at the young soccer players galloping up and down the field, and back at Ursula — three generations of Cubans. He gave Ursula his day rate, advised her that he needed a two-day minimum upfront, and moments later she had made out a check. Willie tucked it away.
“Okay. I want you to contact Mr. Cruz and tell him a representative of the family wants to talk to him, to welcome him to the clan and firm up some details on the wedding. Whatever. Have him call me.”
One of the kids on the field finally scored a goal and a great cheer went up. The lady in the canvas chair clapped. Willie wondered if she would still be clapping when he finished his investigation.
He went home and warmed some leftover chicken and rice for lunch. Then he turned on his laptop, brought up Google, and looked for information on Cuban prisons. He found a list that went province by province and even included some photos of the facilities. About one hundred prisons were listed, including the San Sebastian unit in Santiago province. The photo showed a boxlike cement structure about three stories high, which might have been a very unattractive public-housing project, except all the windows were blocked with bars and it was surrounded by a tall wall with barbed wire on top and guard towers rising high at each comer.
Willie left that site and found others that named political prisoners. The long lists he scanned named people imprisoned over the years, but the compilers warned that the logs were not complete. They wrote that some persons who were in fact political prisoners had been convicted of trumped-up common crimes, or were simply never listed as prisoners of any kind by the government. Willie scanned the lists nevertheless, but did not find the name Norman Cruz.
Many of the sites were run by human-rights groups and included reports of troubles at the facilities — mistreatment of prisoners, hunger strikes, prison riots, et cetera. A couple involved the San Sebastian facility. He scribbled down notes, closed the sites, and moved on to other business.
In addition to his private-investigations firm, Willie served as chief of security for the Latin dance club Caliente, run by his brother Tommy. It was the most popular Latin club in the city, wall-to-wall people, especially on the weekend nights, rum and tequila flowing like rivers, and it required plenty of staff Willie spent the next hour making out schedules for the security details, posting that information, and confirming payroll figures for already completed shifts.
He was just finishing all that when his cell phone sounded. He answered and found a man with a deep but soft voice on the other end.
“Is this Mr. Cuesta?”
“Yes, it is.”
“This is Norman Cruz calling. Ursula Estevez asked me to contact you. I understand you want to meet me?”
He spoke slowly, cautiously.
“Yes, that’s right. I was hoping we could get together sometime today. Would that be possible for you?”
The other man took several moments to think that over.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Maybe we could meet for dinner. Normally I would eat with Lydia, that is Ursula’s mother, but today she has another matter to attend. Maybe we could meet at a restaurant near where I live. It’s called Café Santiago.”
“Yes, I know where that is. Right on Calle Ocho.”
Calle Ocho — Eighth Street — was the main drag in Little Havana.
“That’s right,” Cruz said. “Can you meet me there at five o’clock?”
Willie frowned. That was early for dinner and especially for Cubans, who liked to eat late. The other man seemed to read his mind.
“I know that’s very early, but that was when they fed us in prison and I have found it a habit hard to break.”
Willie didn’t argue. He described what he would be wearing — black silk shirt and cream pants — so that Cruz would recognize him. Then they signed off and Willie went back to his accounts.