"But where he met her," Jimmy said. "That's what I'm saying. You probably don't want to hear this, but I think he was more than drunk that night. I think he was on something. The way he was talking-saying crazy biblical stuff-I think maybe he was doing some kind of hallucinogenic."
"It's possible."
"I tried to get him to go home with me. You know, look after him till he settled down. I don't know him very well, but he never seemed like the self-destructive type. Until the restaurant that night."
I said, "A Cuban-American woman, probably late twenties. Attractive…" I tried to remember what Tomlinson had said about her; made some plausible deductions from that. "She would be unmarried, articulate, well-read, not much money, and probably not from the Keys. Maybe down there trying to meet people."
Jimmy said, "Cubano in her twenties?"
"That's right."
"Why didn't you say so? There was somebody like that. I know who you're talking about-"
"Yeah, Julia-"
"No, her name's not Julia whatever-you-said. Her name's Rita Santoya. 'Least, that's what she told me. She came into the tackle shop that afternoon-during Fantasy Fest?-and said she'd been given my name, maybe I could help her. What she wanted was the names of boat people who might be headed for Cuba, willing to let her go along as crew."
I said, "That's the one."
Jimmy Gardenas said, "In the Cuban-American community, that name still carries a lot of weight-Santoya. The Santoya family controlled most of the sugar production in La Habana Province. Unbelievable wealth, like royalty down there. And damn good people, too, from what I've heard. Of course, they lost it all when Castro took over. So I told her to come by the restaurant that night and I'd introduce her to some guys who might be able to help. I've been so Americanized," Jimmy added, "it's hard for people to believe that I'm Cuban, too. I try to keep up on things; help when I can."
"Maybe she used the name Santoya to impress you," I said.
"I don't think so. She knew the family history too well. It's quite a family. Back in the forties and fifties, when things were about as corrupt as they could get, there were these two rich brothers. Ask any Cuban, they'll know the story. There was Eduardo Santoya and Angel Santoya. Eduardo… this girl we're talking about said Eduardo was her grandfather… well, Eduardo, he was the one who spent a ton of the family's money to help found a political party… I can't remember the name of it… but this party was devoted to administrative honesty, that kind of thing. Doing good stuff… national reforms."
"Ortodoxo," I said.
"Hey!, that's it. Ortodoxo. This rich guy, Eduardo, with nothing to gain, doing it because it was right. His brother, Angel, was involved, too, but he was more into the power part of it. You know how some rich kids are just total shits? That was Angel Santoya. So young Fidel Castro comes along and Angel wants him in the party but Eduardo sees the guy as the clown he is and says no way.
"The brothers have a hell of a fight; splits the whole family. In fifty-nine, when Fidel comes marching down out of the mountains, guess who's right there patting him on the back, telling him what a genius he is? Angel Santoya, by then a working informant. Same day, Eduardo is packing the one bag he's allowed and hustling his wife and teenage son to the airport to escape Fidel's firing squads. They left a couple of mansions behind, a couple thousand acres of prime sugar, I don't know how many yachts and cars. That's the kind of wealth we're talking about."
"This girl, Rita, she claimed to be the daughter of the teenage son?"
"Right. Eduardo the second, Eduardo Senior's only child. Senior, he started out in Miami, then moved up to Trenton, I think-somewhere in New Jersey-where he started from scratch and built a new fortune. I think it was car sales; something like that. But then he went bust. Lost it all. Less then a year later, Eduardo-two-married and a daddy by that time-gets caught by Castro's people back in Havana. They decide he's there to assassinate Fidel, so they march him down to Mariel Harbor, stand junior on a cliff in front of a firing squad, and shoot him."
When Jimmy Gardenas said the word "junior," the name suddenly clicked in my memory: Junior Santoya. I thought, Jesus, I knew the guy.
I said, "That was in seventy-three, right?"
Heard mild laughter through the phone. "A gringo who knows the history better and speaks the language better than me." Like: Why do I bother telling you?
"I remember reading about it," I said.
Jimmy said, "Sure, Doc. Sure. That's not what my friends with Alpha tell me, but, fine. If it's what you want me to believe."
Meaning Alpha Sixty-six, the Cuban Exile Brigade that trained privately and secretly in the Everglades, readying to invade the homeland. With willing intelligence sources in Nicaragua, Masagua, Cuba's Interior Ministry, and Panama's G-2, it was not surprising that certain members knew about me… at least knew what I had once been.
I said, "After the son died, what happened? Rita told you all this?"
"Some of it; some of it I'd already heard. What happens is, Eduardo Senior gets the news about his son being executed and he dies within the month. They said it was a heart attack, but it was more like a broken heart. You know how Cubanos love their kids. Which leaves the grandmother, the mother, and the new daughter all orphaned, penniless. So yeah, a girl comes in here saying she's Rita Santoya, you bet I tried to help her. The Cuban community, we take care of our own."
"Did she say why she wanted to go back to Cuba?"
"She told me she wanted to go back, see where her roots are. Said her grandmother had just died and she'd been reading her grandmother's letters, going through her things, and got the urge. I got the impression her mother was somehow out of the picture. Remarried or something like that; left the girl on her own."
"She's in her twenties?"
"Late twenties, yeah. Not beautiful but handsome-looking. You know the look-outdoorsy, into climbing maybe; like that. She struck me as intelligent; pretty well educated. When I told her it might not be too smart, someone named Santoya poking around Cuba, she didn't seem surprised. Like she'd already thought about it. I figured that's why she wanted to go as crew on a boat. If she flew, she'd have to use a passport."
"That's why she gave Tomlinson a fake name."
"Maybe," Jimmy said. "Thing is, I never saw her talking to Tomlinson. I'm not even sure she was at the table when he came in. 'Fact, I'm pretty sure she wasn't. That's why it didn't click right away."
"Any of the people you introduced her to offer to put her on a boat?"
"They said they'd check around, but I got the feeling they weren't going to risk it. She probably read it the same way."
We spent the next few minutes talking about what Cu-ban-Americans love to talk about: What happens to Cuba when Castro falls? Talked about how it would be; the fast changes that would take place on the island the exiles were forced to leave but where, in their hearts, they still lived. Just before we hung up, Jimmy said, "I'll tell you one thing-they find out Tomlinson's with Rita Santoya, the daughter of the man who wanted to kill Fidel, he's apt to lose a lot more than his boat."
Dewey had gone off mysteriously; disappeared in her rental car-which really wasn't much of a mystery. Four days before Christmas, people are prone to disappear. She'd probably driven to the mainland; was shouldering her way through the Edison Mall circus, doing her shopping. So I worked around the lab, alternately trying to telephone my friend Armando Azcona-kept getting his recorder-and finishing up unfinished business. Because I had already left a message with the secretary of General Juan Rivera, down there in the small Central American country of Masagua, I didn't want to stray far from the phone. The general would call me back; he always had. I was less certain of contacting Armando.