Before I jumped into the sky over the ocean, I told her. Told her that even though she now knew I hadn’t pulled that heist, I would never be able to clear myself with her bosses till I recovered that missing forty mil.
“You’ll have to wait for me,” I told her.
“Forever if I have to,” she’d said.
But now I could only wonder...would I ever see my wife again?
Pedro’s wife Maria was the one with the powerful lungs whose screaming complaints had made the militia’s life so miserable, not long ago.
Sitting across from her, my belly bursting with black beans, rice and Ropa Viela—beef that to me looked like Carolina pulled pork—I could make out the voluptuous beauty she’d once been, before her own good cooking got away from her.
She was still a handsome woman, towering over her husband, with liquid brown eyes buried in happy folds of fat that gave her face the appearance of a big baby’s. When she was sure the two men at her table had both had their fill, she was content to sit back and watch us placidly smoke Cuban cigars and drink cold beer. Now and again, she would nod as Pedro recounted their years together, before Castro.
They had been prosperous farmers then, but the loss of their station hadn’t put a schism in their relationship. Today Pedro owned the grocery store below us as well as operating a successful garage, using knowledge acquired fixing tractors on his farm, and Maria seemed more proud of him than ever. If these two were a sample of the Cuban refugee situation, then there was no problem in our side accepting Castro’s rejects.
Somehow Pedro managed to turn the conversation around to me. No details about the Rose Castle escape had ever seen publication, but his intimate knowledge of pertinent facts meant he had a real pipeline into Nuevo Cadiz. When Maria saw me squirm under her husband’s compliments, she silenced him with a wave of her pudgy hand.
Her rosebud mouth pursed into a smile. “They tell us, señor, of a woman, a very beautiful woman who was at your side in Nuevo Cadiz. She was your wife, they say.”
Even just the mention of her was jolting. Kim, with the wild, glossy black hair, the outrageously perfect body, eyes that could mix all the emotions at once and unleash them through the moist warmth of those full lips.
“She was my wife,” I said quietly.
Maria’s eyes studied my face and what she saw there brought the faintest frown to her forehead. “Truly your wife?”
Pedro winced.
“We were married,” I said. “It was part of...do you understand what I mean by cover story?”
“Si,” she said as she nodded. “Still...you loved her, no?”
“I loved her, yes.”
Pedro sat forward. “Maria...”
She cut her husband off with another wave. “And she...?”
“She loved me, all right.”
“But was your union...how do you say, matrimonio consumado?”
“We never got the chance,” I said with a sad smile.
A flush of indignation spread across Pedro’s face and he half-rose from his chair. “Maria! There are matters one prefers not to discuss in polite company. These things, they are most personal, and—”
“Oh, be still, Pedro, my little donkey. There are matters of which men know nothing at all. They must be led like children. They must be—”
“Maria!”
“It’s okay, Pedro,” I said, not offended. I looked across at Maria and let the ache in my chest die down. “Like I say, I was forced to marry her—so the job could be done. It had to...look real.”
“But you said you loved each other,” she reminded me.
“Things were...different then. We were caught up in something bigger than we were. It was exciting and dangerous. That kind of thing plays hell with your thinking. If she’s smart, she’ll have forgotten all about me.”
The voluptuous beauty she’d once been peered out from inside the fat woman, and eyes that knew lust and love met mine. “I do not think, Señor Morgan, that any woman, she can forget you.”
Pedro, frowning, sighed, and made a gesture of apology to me.
I ignored him, and told her, “Maybe she’ll be lucky, then.”
“Losing a man such as you, señor, would not be lucky.”
“Kim was a decent woman, courageous and on the right side of the fence. Face it, amigos, I’m a first-class hood. I’ve done time, and if I get nailed, I’ll do plenty more. You think I want her to have any part of me?”
Maria shook her head sadly. “That question is for her to answer.”
“She won’t get the chance, mamacita. I love her enough to want her out of my life. For her own good.”
There was something else my hostess wanted to say, but somewhere a buzzer hummed two short bursts, and Maria stopped her question abruptly.
Pedro’s head snapped around, he glanced at his wife, then pushed his chair back. He saw the way I was sitting there, tense, hands gripping the edge of the table, and he squeezed my shoulder.
“This is nothing concerning you, Señor Morgan. It is another matter entirely. Stay there, por favor.”
He got up, walked into the next room, and I heard a door open and shut quietly.
With a calming gesture, Maria said, “The buzzer that you hear? It is one used only by our friends.”
Within a minute Pedro was back again. He came into the room first, made sure nothing had changed, then stepped aside and nodded.
The man with him could have been anywhere from forty to sixty. He was taller than Pedro, his carriage erect, his gaze sharp, a slender dignified figure in a dark suit and white shirt with a bolo tie. He let his eyes take in every detail of the room before he seemed to relax.
Time or something else had shot his hair with strands of white and some of the lines that etched his face hadn’t been put there by the years. His trim mustache with spade beard, however, was black as a raven’s wing. There was something familiar about him that I couldn’t place.
And one thing I didn’t want to see right now was a familiar face. If I knew someone, then he had to know me.
I didn’t have to say a word. He seemed to read my mind and smiled gently. “It seems we are two of a kind, señor. We recognize what lies below the surface. May I introduce myself? I am Luis Saladar, late of the Republic of Cuba.”
Then I remembered him. We had never met, but I did remember him....
He had fought both Batista and Castro, though the guns against his opposition party were too big and too many. His supporters had broken him out of one of Castro’s jails the day before he was to be executed. He had asked for political asylum in this country and gotten it.
Only now the feds were looking for Saladar under a deportation order, because he had been trying to organize another revolutionary group to invade Cuba and the doves in government were too jittery to upset the status quo. After the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, and the Kennedy assassination, our government’s Cuban operations had been curtailed. The current White House would rather let the menace exist ninety miles off our coastline than risk any more problems with Russia.
“Morgan,” I said and held out my hand. “I guess we are two of a kind.”
His grip was firm, his eyes steady on mine. “I realize your situation here, señor. Let me assure you that I took every precaution not to be observed. There are still police about, but I was not seen.”
“You sound sure of yourself.”