He slips out of bed and into a robe and walks to the French windows of his bedroom. His wife stirs but does not wake. They both take sleeping pills, and he hopes he will not need another one tonight. It would make him groggy all morning, which he cannot really afford. He has called a meeting of the other principals of Consuela to discuss the threat represented by the incident in his office. He hopes they can resolve it without bringing the Colombian into it directly. Fuentes has squeezed the law many times during his career, but this is the first time he has ever done business with an actualnarcolista. Although officially, on paper, there is no connection. He doesn’t like it, but the profits are potentially enormous, and it is not like they are actually in the drug business themselves. Probably not actually, but the important thing is, he doesn’t have to know anything about it. And to make sure the insulation is still intact, or if not, to repair it. He thinks that the screaming boy should not be hard to find, if it should come to that.
Fuentes opens the French window and steps out onto the little balcony. The air is fresh and scented by night-blooming jasmine and the marine tang of the bay. He is on the second floor here and he can look out at the expanse of water. It is a clear night with a fat moon riding high above a single line of cloud. He can just make out the lights of Key Biscayne and Cape Florida to the east. Sometimes, he has found, a little pacing back and forth on this balcony will tire him enough so that he will sleep.
He takes a few steps and stops short. There is something wrong. What is it? Something he has forgotten to do? He glances back to the bedroom walclass="underline" the emerald gleam of the security light is on, the house is sealed. He hears a scratching sound overhead and starts violently, then allows himself a secret, self-deprecating laugh. Raccoons. He will have to have the man out with the traps again. But this whole incident has made him uncharacteristically jumpy. I’m nervous as a cat, he thinks to himself, and begins to pace.
He paces the ten feet, turns, and ten back, and his head while he paces is full of figures. He is the numbers guy in the group. Calderón had the Colombian contacts, Garza generated the seed money, and Ibanez has the machinery to turn the timber into cash, for there are still plenty of people whose hunger for prime mahogany precludes asking any questions about where it came from. It would be good if they had a survey of the area, how many trees they could expect per hectare and so on, to get a clearer picture. Using averages was fine, but they had heard rumors about the incredible density of growth in the Puxto, was it possible it was as high as four trees per? He does some mental calculation on that basis: the mesa was twelve hundred square miles, convert to hectares at 259 per square mile, and say itwas four trees per, that would be a million trees, figure average radius of a meter and a half, thirty tall, that would be, say, two hundred cubic meters of usable wood from each and…and in the midst of these ruminations he hears again that noise above him, a scraping on the tiles.
He raises his eyes to the roof, sees nothing, and resumes his pacing and his thought: two hundred million cubic meters of prime old-growth mahogany, Jesus! Although they’d have to play a little with the market because they wouldn’t want the price to drop much below the going fifteen hundred dollars per cube…but another sound interrupts his figures, like a cat’s purr but much louder.
Ararah. Ararararh.
Fuentes looks up again. No, not a raccoon.
Jimmy Paz walked into the kitchen of Guantanamera, his restaurant (actually his mother’s restaurant), and cast a practiced eye across the room. It was Wednesday, so the specials were seafood salad andajiaco criollo, a beef stew whose recipe had been in his mother’s family for generations, and which was famous among local aficionados of down-home Cuban cooking. Cesar, the chef, was accordingly prepping all the marine life-forms that would go into the salad-lobster, stone crab, shrimp, squid-and Rafael, the prep cook, was cutting and peeling the fruits and roots-malanga amarilla, yuca, green plantain, boniato, malanga blanca, calabaza, and ñame yam-that would go into the stew. Also at the prep table, to Paz’s surprise, was Amelia, who was carving flowers out of pickled mushrooms and radishes and also slicing lemons in half and giving them a scalloped edge, all for the seafood salad garniture. She was standing on a stool, and the apron she was wearing came down to cover her pink sneakers, as she was only three foot four.
“How come you’re not in school?” asked Paz.
“It’s a teacher’s work day. I told you, Daddy. And we’re supposed to go to Matheson after lunch. You forgot.”
“I did forget,” said Paz. “Do you think I’m the worst daddy in the world?”
The child considered this seriously for a moment. “Not in thewhole world. But you shouldn’t forget stuff. Abuela says you would forget your head if it wasn’t tied to your neck.” This last phrase was quoted in Cuban Spanish, with the Guantanamero accent Paz knew so well. The child was perfectly bilingual.
“I remember where you’re ticklish, and if you didn’t have that knife in your hands I would tickle youso much,” said Paz, and was rewarded with a giggle. “I’m busy, Daddy,” she then said, now imitating the mother, Doctor Mom, an extremely busy person at all times. Paz watched his daughter cut vegetables for a moment. She was slow but accurate, and respected the blade without fearing it. Her grandmother had let her peel carrots at four, and now, nearly three years later, she had many small paring tasks well in hand. The blade she was using was sharp as a scalpel, but Paz didn’t worry about it at all, because if she cut herself it would be a clean one, and getting sliced was part of the education of a chef. This was, however, an appraisal he had never put into so many words to the child’s mother. He put on his own apron and started cutting up meat for theajiaco: short ribs, flank steak, andtasajo, salt-dried beef.
Four hours later, Paz stood in seeming chaos as the lunch rush crested; seeming only, for the three men and the woman who made up the kitchen crew at the restaurant Guantanamera were like trained athletes or soldiers working on the edge of catastrophe amid flashing blades, boiling cauldrons, burners shooting out gouts of flame, pans spitting fat. The waiters shouted, the cooks shouted back, the dishwasher rumbled, and Jimmy Paz worked the grill station within a self-created egg of calm. The dozen or so pieces of expensive protein in front of him-marinated steaks, pork chops, snapper fillets, lobster tails, giant prawns-all cooking at different rates toward different degrees of doneness, on a grill whose temperature varied every couple of inches and that was gradually getting hotter overall as the hours went by-were all present as little clocks and calculations in his head, all perfectly unconscious but crowding any unwanted thoughts from his grateful mind. It was what Paz did instead of religion or meditation. Thus, now, thoughtlessly as a fish swims, Paz produced a meal for a party of four-a lobster, a steak, some pork chops, a handful of tiger prawns, all cooked to perfection and all ready at exactly the same instant. He loaded each entrée onto a warm plate and shoved them down to Yolanda, the line cook, to be garnished, sauced, veggied, and shipped out the service port. And another and another, until, and this was about two-thirty, there was a subtle slackening in the pace, and then the noise faded, there were only two or three things on the grill, and it was over. Paz went to the sink, splashed some water on his face, and drank an icy Hatuey beer down in two long swallows.
“Daddy?”
Paz looked up to see his daughter dressed for the dining room in a floor-length black skirt, a lavishly pleated white blouse (with a name tag that readAMELIA), shiny Mary Janes, and a red hibiscus stuck in her mass of pale brown curls: the world’s smallest hostess. This was herabuela ’s idea and confection, and so cute that people waiting for tables were often brought to their knees through excess of delight. She was very good at it, too, and it took a nasty customer indeed to bitch to this one about seating.