“They knew about Consuela and the Puxto,” said Garza. “Maybe that makes it a shade less preposterous.”
This appeared to take some of the bluster out of Calderón. He nodded and drank his Laphroaig. “Yes,” he said, “that’s troubling. They shouldn’t have known about the Puxto. But it’s still stupid to connect the two events without more information. The two things may be unrelated.”
“Do you think that’s likely, Yoiyo?” asked Ibanez gently. Calderón looked straight into the seamed turtle face and said, “Why not? Look, what was it, eight or nine years ago? That nigger maniac chopped Teresa Vargas into pieces, and that was connected to nothing at all. Some insane cult, whatever…so this could be the same, the cat prints. It’s Miami, these things happen. You never think it’s going to happen to someone you know, but now it does. It happened to the Vargas girl, and now it happened to Fuentes. That’s one possibility. The next possibility is it was political. Tony gave money to the resistance, he was quiet about it but it wasn’t a secret. We all do, yes? So maybe it was that.”
“You think Fidel sent an agent to kill Antonio Fuentes?” asked Garza, incredulous.
“Of course not. I’m just laying out the logical possibilities. So, next, we have, yes, something connected with the Consuela deal. Something out of Colombia. Why? Everything is arranged at that end and has been for months. So we don’t know, and frankly, I’d find it hard to believe. As a matter of fact, it feels like a maniac again to me. Maybe that nigger left disciples, only this time he’s going after men and not pregnant girls.”
“But you’ll check out the Colombian angle, won’t you?” said Ibanez. Again Calderón saw that look between the two of them. Consuela had been his deal, and the message here was that if there was any mess associated with it, it was his to clean up. He got a quarter, no, now a third, of the profits but had all the work to do. A certain resentment here, but if things had to be done he would rather do them himself than leave it to this pair ofviejos. He took, however, a considerable time before responding, to show he was not their errand boy. “Of course,” he said then, “I’ll be glad to, Felipe.”
The rest of the lunch passed pleasantly enough, in discussions of other matters of business, local politics, and their various interests. After lunch, Calderón called his driver on the cell phone and found his white Lincoln waiting for him when he reached the street. He was driven back to his firm’s headquarters, housed in a new mirrored glass cube on Andalusia in Coral Gables. His private office was furnished in mahogany, leather, and worn old Persian carpets, all expensive, understated, and chosen by an interior decorator not often employed by Cuban businessmen. Calderón did not want to be associated with that sort of Cuban at all, the people who had run little shops in Havana and were now magnates in America.Cursilería was the word for the style of such people, vulgar and ostentatious.
He was efficiently rude to his staff, and after some scurrying and scraping, he conducted a meeting about a golf course and resort condo development he had begun near Naples, on the west coast of the state. It was the largest thing he had ever attempted, and he had financed it with an unstable structure of rolling credit, in addition to nearly all his own liquid capital. The profits would be colossal, but he was now somewhat overextended, which was the main reason why he had organized Consuela Holdings LLC. The timber money should start coming on line just in time to cover the first series of notes on Consuela Coast Resort and Condominiums. Provided everything went off on schedule.
When he was alone again, he dialed a number in Cali, Colombia, and after a few brief conversations in Spanish with underlings, he was connected to a man with a low, quiet voice. Calderón understood that Gabriel Hurtado was what the U.S. media called a drug lord, but he was quite capable of cloaking this knowledge from his ordinary consciousness. He was a man of aristocratic pretension and habit, and the ability to ignore the ultimate sources of one’s wealth is a commonplace talent among such men. The Kennedys and the Bronfmans spent bootlegging dollars with clear consciences, and the fortunes of his own family and those of most of his Cuban friends derived at a couple of removes from slave labor. Money washes, as the saying goes, and in any case Hurtado was not a mere thug. He was well connected with the government of his nation and was at least as well insulated from drug cartel massacres as Joe Kennedy had been from the machine guns of Al Capone. There is an immense flood of Latin American money swimming around Miami seeking safe investment, whose provenance does not bear too much inspection, and many such dollars under the control of Hurtado had over the years swum into the projects of JXF Calderón Associates, Inc., to the mutual profit of both men.
They exchanged pleasantries, and then Calderón told him about the events of the last few days, stressing especially the knowledge of the Puxto business shown by the maniac in Antonio Fuentes’s office.
“So the reason I’m calling,” he went on, “is to check out whether the leak came from your end.”
“That’s impossible,” said Hurtado. “My people know how to keep their mouths shut.” This was said with a certainty that could not be doubted, although Calderón’s mind did not long settle upon what made for such certainty. He said, “Of course. What I meant is the possibility that someone down there wants to make trouble for us, for you, in some way. A rival. Someone who thinks he didn’t get enough of a…consideration, a commission, whatever.”
A pause on the line. “I’ll look into it. There was some crazy priest down there in San Pedro who was threatening to make a stink, but he’s out of the picture. Meanwhile, you got somecabrón wandering around Miami with information he’s not supposed to have. What’re we going to do about that, Yoiyo?”
“I’ll handle it at this end,” said Calderón.
“You may need some help.”
“I’m fine, Gabriel. I was just checking with you.”
“That’s good, but I want you to remember that I have commitments on this thing, to people down here. I’m talking about significant people. So it can’t go sour on us. You’re clear on that, yes?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Fine. Your family okay? Olivia and Victoria and Jonni?”
“Everybody’s great,” said Calderón.
“Good. You’ll keep me informed, yes?” The connection broke before Calderón could respond. It was not really a question anyway. Calderón was now trying to recall whether, in the course of their extensive business relationship, he had ever mentioned his family to Hurtado. It would not be a thing he routinely did. He had the old-fashioned Cubano sense of strict separation between the world of affairs and the interior world of the home. He was, however, absolutely sure that Hurtado had never asked about them by name before. Suddenly he discovered that he wanted to leave the office and have a strong drink of scotch.
Moie watches the world float by from the windows of thewai’ichura canoe that floats on dry ground. He says the namecar in his head and is grateful to the Firehair Woman for having given it to him. It is always good to have the names of things. He is happy to have met Cooksey and to have received answers to many of the questions that troubled him. He now understands that thewai’ichuranan cannot change the stars in the sky, and also that they didn’t know they were dead at all, but thought they were living life. He thinks of the stars again, that they are not always the same in the sky but like trees along a path, and that as you move a long way across the earth they change in the same way. This is a wonder to him and makes him a little sad.
The car turns and enters a compound of several buildings and they dismount from it, all three of them. There are other dead people there, including the Monkey Boy, who looks a curse at Moie, which he averts with some words in the holy tongue. There is an angry woman who speaks too much and too loud and one man with a beard who speaks slowly and is the chief of this place, and another man who has a hairy face but does not speak much. They chatter in their monkey talk but also to him in Spanish, and when he does not understand, Cooksey says in Runisi what they have said.