Greer came by amp; I let him come in. Told him the whole wretched story and he declined to give me any daddyish wise advice only asked, do you think we’ll get our stuff back? amp; I told him that my dad was calling my uncle Bill, who was the VP of the World Bank amp; Hank Schorr his old sailing buddy, who was CFO of Exxon amp; they would probably make some calls about it. I said if we did not get it all back then neocolonialism was total bullshit amp; we could joint-author a paper on it. Laughed. Then he said I’ve seen this before, a black man, American, comes to Africa, all pumped up, he’s coming home, man, precious lost Guinee. Then he finds out there’s no light in the window for him. The people here see him amp; they don’t see the black skin that’s always defined him his whole life. They see an American, with more money than they’ll ever have in their wildest dreams, just like the other Americans. But I’m black, the guy says, amp; they just look at him. Then it hits him: there ain’t no black people in Africa. We got the Yoruba, Hausa, Ibo, Fulani, Ga, Fon, Mandinka, Dogon amp; Tofinu amp; a couple hundred others, but no black folks except maybe where there are white tribes like in S. Africa. So, hey, you want to look for roots? God bless, but don’t expect to be recognized. Guinee’s dead amp; gone amp; negritude ain’t going to help you. America is your nation, heaven your destination, and tough shit. And he looked puzzled, said, It’s funny, seen his plays, read his stuff, I thought if anybody would be hip to that, it would’ve been him.
He’s still invisible, I said. He thought I would be invisible here, but I’m not.
He said, I’ll go talk to him, I said thank you, he said, I honor the suffering, the history, the culture, the guts it took to survive and get over. I’m in awe. Then he pinched the skin on his arm, but this color? It’s horseshit. He pushed a strand of my hair back behind my ear. He said, You know, they used to sell girls with hair like this to guys like me in the slave markets of Algiers.
Those were the days, I said, amp; we both laughed.
9/14 Lagos
This a.m. big army truck pulled up to our hotel amp; soldiers unloaded all our equipment. Some of it was uncrated amp; had obviously been used. One of the laptops had a cracked screen amp; 100 megabytes of hard-core porn on its disk.
Saw W. watching from inside along with Ola. I asked him if he wasn’t going to help drag the stuff in off the street, but he gave me a strange look amp; turned away. He can’t be disappointed that we got the stuff back?
NINE
Doris, that’s all I’m telling you, because that’s all we know right now,” lied Jimmy Paz. “You have enough for a great story, you’ll win another prize. No, I don’t know whether this is the work of a crazed serial killer. Okay, crazed, I’ll give you crazed, serial we don’t know yet. Right, go ahead and print that: police wait for him to strike again. Helplessly wait, that’s better.”
Paz held the receiver a few inches from his ear and Cesar the prep cook grinned at him around a lot of gold. Paz was in the kitchen of his mother’s restaurant and on the phone, as he had promised, with Doris Taylor the crime reporter. It was six-thirty, a relatively peaceful time in the kitchen, for only the tourists ate that early. Satan might be loose in Dade County, but people still had to eat, and perforce others had to cook for them. Paz, who did not believe in Satan, had left Barlow as soon as he could manage and come here.
“I understand that,” he said calmly, “believe me, but … where did you hear that? Hey, if you hear stuff, you’re supposed to inform the police. No, we have no evidence that it was a cult killing. No, of course it wasn’t a domestic. Why don’t you call it a presumed deranged individual? No, you can’t quote me on that, I’m not supposed to be talking to you at all. I got to go now, Doris. Fine. Right, just keep my name out of the papers. I love you, too, Doris. Bye.”
Paz hung up and turned to face his mother, whose eye he had felt upon him for the last minute or so of this conversation. Margarita Paz had heavy eyes; sometimes Jimmy felt them upon him when he was many miles away, often when he was doing one of the very many things of which she would not approve.
“Who were you talking to, tying up my phone like that?”
“Nobody, Mami, just some business.”
“That phone’s for my business, not your business. You going to work in those fancy clothes?” She looked him up and down. Cesar the prep cook had retreated to the reefer on Mrs. Paz’s entry.
Paz and his mother locked eyes. Hers were on a level with his own because she was wearing four-inch cork platforms on her feet. And a yellow dress, and a yellow diamond on her finger, and a comb in her black hair, elaborately done up. Real lace around the collar of the dress and a plain gold cross against the dark throat. Her uniform of every evening.
Paz had been working in the restaurant in various capacities since the age of seven, and his mother made no distinction between working a meal after school and working a meal after an eight-hour shift with the cops, except that after a shift he was even more available, since there was no homework. Paz had tried to explain the difference between after-school work and after-work work many times, but Mrs. Paz was skilled at the art of not listening.
He smiled to break the stare and said, “Okay, Mami,” which was the right answer, because she gave a la-reine-le-veult nod and turned away. Paz loved his mother and because of this he allowed her to believe that she was still in control of his life, Cuban fashion. But in his mother’s mind, Jimmy Paz was not at all a satisfactorily controlled son. He had, for example, not finished college and gone on to a medical or law degree. He was not even a dentist! Mrs. Paz did not consider law enforcement an acceptable profession for her son. Nor had he married a girl of suitable family and skin tone (pale), thus supplying her with a daughter-in-law to dominate and grandchildren to spoil. Instead, he ran around with a succession of American women, all of whom, despite their fancy educations, were little better than whores.
Paz understood that until he had an acceptable profession and a wife, his mother would continue to treat him like a schoolboy. This did not bother him much, as he had no compunction about cutting out of the restaurant when cop work called, and the restaurant work paid for, in his mind, if not in hers, a rather nice apartment.
He left the kitchen and went into the dining room. As always, this brought him a moment of delight, this contrast between the organized chaos of the kitchen and the calm of the dining room. It was high-ceilinged, decorated in shiny white, yellow, pink, and cream; the tiles underfoot were coffee-colored; the chairs and tables were of heavy rattan, painted white. The rear wall was decorated with gilt mirrors, and the two side walls bore a series of Roman arches in white plaster, through which one looked out at brightly painted representations of Guantanamo Bay. Rattan and brass fans rotated slowly and exiguously overhead, stirring the chilled, conditioned air. The room was as close as the memory and resources of Margarita Paz could come to reproducing the dining room at Tanaimo, the great tobacco finca where her mother had served as a cook.
Paz reflexively checked the house. Every table was occupied, most of them by pale Americanos, but there were several tables of Germans and two of Japanese. A group of crisply dressed foreign tourists waited with their tour guide on the other side of a huge saltwater fish tank. Margarita Paz was a spectacularly good cook, and her place was listed in any number of restaurant guides as worth a special trip. She trained her waiters well, they all spoke English, and Jimmy had written for the menu concise explanations of the contents and preparation of the various dishes. A tourist-friendly place, by design. Later, when the Cubans showed up, there would be larger crowds waiting for a table. In Cuban Miami they said you went to the Versailles to be seen, but to eat you went down the street. The street was Eighth Street, aka the Tamiami Trail, called Calle Ocho by nearly everyone now. (Barlow still called it the Trail.) Down the street meant this place. Every Cuban man is obliged to defend his mother’s cooking as the best in the world, but in Paz’s case it might have been true.