“No strings attached?”

“No strings.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t I believe you?”

The colonel took a cigar from the humidor on his desk, rolled it between his thumb and index finger. “I said it before, and I say it again. You are such a skeptic, Mr. Swyteck.”

“I told you the last time we met: I’m not cutting any deals with the Cuban government.”

“We are not after any deals.”

“Then what’s in this for you?”

“We have decided that it is delightful enough for us to show the world that Alejandro Pintado’s son was married to a slut and was murdered by his best friend.”

“And what if I decide to deny you that pleasure?”

“Meaning what?”

“What if I simply decline to call your soldier as a witness?”

“I suggest you think very hard about that. Or it’s Lindsey Hart who suffers.”

“Maybe Lindsey is willing to take that chance.”

“Maybe. But perhaps there are others who do not have the luxury of choice.” He reached into his drawer and removed an eight-by-ten photograph. He laid it on the desktop.

Jack examined it. A group of people were standing on the sidewalk, watching as men in dark green uniforms hauled their belongings into the street. Clothes were strewn in the gutter. Furniture had been busted into pieces. “What is this?” Jack asked.

“Look closely,” said the colonel.

Jack tightened his gaze, and then he recognized it. Standing off to one side was Felicia Méndez, the Bejucal woman to whom Jack had spoken about his mother. She was sobbing into her husband’s shoulder. Others in the photograph were crying, too, including two young girls, perhaps six and eight.

“This is Casa Méndez,” said Jack.

The colonel sniffed his cigar, savoring the rich tobacco. “Yes. I’m sorry to report that they lost their leasehold. Just happened yesterday. Thirteen people, no place to live now. Such a shame.”

“You took their home away?”

“It’s not like they can’t get it back. Or should I say, it’s not like you can’t give it back to them.”

“You son of a bitch. Is that what your boy in Miami meant when he said you’d treat my family like gusanos?”

“Indirectly, yes. Of course, we know that the Méndez family is not your family. But this is a good starting point.”

“Are you implying that you have designs on actual blood relatives I may have here in Cuba?”

He nearly smiled, then his expression ran cold. “It wouldn’t be much of an implication if I were to come right out and admit it. Would it, Mr. Swyteck?”

Jack didn’t answer.

The colonel rose and pushed a button near his telephone. The double doors immediately opened, and the two soldiers posted outside his library entered.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Swyteck. I’ll give you a few days to consider your response.”

“Colonel, I-”

Colonel Jiménez cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Talk to the dead captain’s wife.” He chuckled to himself and said, “Aye, would I love to be the fly on the wall for those conversations?”

Jack wanted to slug him, but he held his tongue. The more he kept talking, the more likely he was to say something about Jack’s half sibling, and despite all the threats, it wasn’t clear that the colonel knew anything about that. Jack didn’t want to be the one to tell him.

“You’ll hear from me. One way or another.” Jack left the colonel’s residence in the company of the two soldiers, saying not another word all the way to the airport.

27

Jack had five hours to kill at Havana Airport. The first leg of his circuitous Miami-via-Cancun journey wasn’t scheduled to leave until dinnertime, so he found a seat at the restaurant and grabbed a demitasse of espresso, which made him only more restless. One more cup of this stuff, and he probably could swim home.

“More coffee?” the waitress asked.

“You don’t happen to have decaffeinated, do you?”

She laughed and walked away. Coffee without caffeine? That was apparently the Cuban equivalent of stopping in the middle of sex to do the laundry.

Stimulants or not, Jack’s anxiety level was up. Although Private Castillo had seemed truthful, Jack knew better than to accept at face value anything the Cuban government had to offer. His only shot at the whole truth was Lindsey herself. Was she having an affair with Lieutenant Johnson? Had they been together the night her husband was shot? It was up to Jack to get some straight answers out of his client. Or not. He’d defended plenty of accused murderers who had never told him the whole story. As a criminal defense lawyer, you dealt with it. The problem here, however, was that he wasn’t only a criminal defense lawyer. He was Brian’s biological father. And Jack wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of his own flesh and blood being raised by the woman who had murdered the boy’s adoptive father. As his friend Theo Knight had so aptly put it on day one, he was caught in his own zipper. Jack had to get the truth.

But first, he had to kill five hours.

He walked around the terminal, checked out the vending machines, and then found a bank of pay phones. In Cuba it was true that you never knew who was listening, but the risk of someone making any sense of Jack’s voicemail messages by eavesdropping on a pay phone seemed remote. Even so, he didn’t call his office. He checked only his personal messages at home, which usually consisted of Theo bitching about some bogus call the ref had made in last night’s Heat game or Abuela telling him about the nice Cuban checkout girl she’d met at Publix.

“You have one new message,” announced the robotic voice on the answering machine.

Jack got a pen and a scrap of paper to jot it down, then relaxed at the sound of Abuela’s recorded voice.

“Hola, mi vida.”

There was a long pause, but Jack was relieved to hear her start with a term of endearment. Before leaving Miami, he’d called and told her he was headed for Cuba, just so someone would know where he was. Of course, he couldn’t tell her why he was going to Cuba, which had only set her off all over again. She was sure that Jack was going back to Bejucal to stir up more scandal about his mother. She’d actually hung up on him.

“I’m sorry.” She said it in English, then switched to Spanish, so Jack knew that she had something important to say, something from the heart.

“I am so very sorry. I can’t expect you to understand this, so all I can do is ask you to forgive me.”

She sniffled, and Jack wished he could say something to her, but all he could do was listen to the message.

“When I sent your mother to Miami, lots of parents were sending their children away. The Catholic Church had the evacuation program-Pedro Pan. We’ve talked about that. Parents could send their children to live in freedom, and if all went well the family would hopefully reunite later. The important thing was to get the children out of the country before Castro and his rebels made it impossible to leave. I know that’s why you think I sent your mother to Miami, but I-my situation was different. I sent your mother away because…”

His grip tightened on the phone, as he had the foreboding sense that she was about to tell him something that she could say only to an answering machine, that she could never say in person.

Abuela’s voice faded, but Jack heard her say, “Because I was ashamed of her. She met that boy and-” She stopped herself, as if unable to say the word pregnant even after all these years. “-and I was ashamed of her.”

Jack closed his eyes and absorbed the recorded sounds of her painful sobbing. He had never seen Abuela cry, except tears of joy. In his mind’s eye, he could see her agony, and it tore him up inside.

She was trying to compose herself, but her aged voice still quaked. “I sent Ana Maria away, and I told her I never wanted to see her again. I didn’t mean it. I swear I didn’t mean it. But I said it. Out of my own pride I said it right to her face. Pride can be such an awful thing. Out of pride, I sinned against God and my own daughter. And now…and for that, God has punished me. I never saw her again.”