Goyo scrabbled westward in his linen suit and Panama hat, his cane barely grazing the sidewalk. This was his chance, the grand opportunity offered to him by Fate, or God, or the Devil. He stopped to rest against the display window of a Madison Avenue jewelry store. A steam vent fogged up his glasses. The back of his suit was soaking wet, and he gave off a sharp ammonia smell. A security guard emerged from behind the gleaming watches and asked if he was all right. Goyo didn’t have the breath to respond and waved him away. He reached for his inhaler and took a breath. Fear, courage, courage, fear; the two were inextricably bound.
He reminded himself to go about his usual business so that nobody would suspect his motives. Goyo agonized about leaving his affairs in such a disorganized state. His brownstone was practically in ruins. He hadn’t heard a word from Goyito since dropping him off in New Jersey. And Alina had been evicted from the Fairchild botanic garden for swimming in its lagoon (photographing endangered waterfowl, she claimed). Maybe his dream of dying a hero was illusory—eight parts smoke, two parts vanity.
At his physical therapist’s office, Goyo adjusted the torturous quadriceps machine to the lowest possible weight. He set his jaw and attempted to raise his shins. Nada.
“Lift, Mr. Herrera, lift,” the therapist urged him. “This will strengthen your thighs and the muscles around your knees.”
Goyo put every ounce of energy he had into budging the ten-pound bar. It rose half an inch, then clanked back into place. If his legs wouldn’t raise it, then his mind would. The Jesuits used to say that the mind was the body’s most powerful organ, after the heart. Slowly, painfully, the bar rose until his thigh muscles quivered and his legs were at a right angle to his body. This was his boot camp, his antechamber to glory. He must be in the best possible shape to complete his task. In less than a day, he would restore the tarnished name of the Herrera clan. He’d lost much more than an island paradise to that tyrant. He’d lost his brief season of youth.
“You’re making progress,” the therapist encouraged him. “At this rate, you’ll be dancing in no time.”
That had to be a joke. Goyo was a pariah at dance parties, inflictor in chief of bruises and swollen toes. At the Key Biscayne Yacht Club Christmas parties, drunken bacchanalias where wife swapping was occasionally still practiced, Luisa used to dance with everyone but him.
On the culo machine, Goyo groaned like a straining rope as he lifted another stack of bars.
“Tell me about your diet, Mr. Herrera,” the therapist asked, his pen poised over the clipboard.
“No diet,” Goyo grunted, finishing his last set.
“I don’t mean for you to lose weight but for your health.”
“Cojones, what does it matter? I won’t eat my vegetables.” He pictured his insides looking like so much ground beef.
“What about fruit?”
“I eat fruit.”
The therapist brightened, clicking his pen.
“Mangoes. Papayas. Piñas.” Goyo disentangled his legs from the machine. When he was growing up, there were no such things as gyms or cardiovascular anything; only fun, and swimming, and sex. People ate whatever the hell they wanted. No one taught you how to take care of your body; your body took care of itself.
“What else do you—”
“I’m very busy today. Can we finish this next time?” Good move, Goyo thought. When the FBI interrogated the therapist, he would have to say that his client had come to his regular appointment and behaved normally; that is to say, crankily. No one would think him capable of committing such an act.
His daughter called and sounded uncharacteristically forlorn. “When are you coming home, Papi?”
“Pronto, mija. Muy pronto,” Goyo said, and his voice broke.
He limped down West Forty-Sixth Street, tempted to stop in for a feijoada at Via Brasil, but he feared even a modest bowlful might knock him unconscious for days. He decided to head to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral instead. It’d been a regular stop for him on his travels to boarding school in the 1940s. Goyo had filled an entire album with the photographs he’d taken of the magnificent bronze Atlas across the street. Atlas represented the sort of man the Jesuits admired, someone who not only inhabited the world but also literally shouldered its burdens.
Goyo hoisted himself up the front steps of the cathedral, tucking in behind a group of Korean tourists. The cool, Gothic interior reinforced the ideal Catholic view of the world as orderly, righteous, enlightened. Pain seared through his joints as he knelt down in a back pew. Mass was under way. Luminous white gladioli girded the altar. When he was a boy, the priests’ sartorial splendor had appealed to Goyo’s sense of style, and for one fervent week following a bout of post-tonsillectomy quinsy, he’d deluded himself into believing that he’d been called. The organ bellowed a hymn in G minor that echoed throughout the cathedral. Goyo tried to imagine the bells of Saint Patrick’s and every last church from here to Tierra del Fuego pealing jubilantly with the news: Murió el tirano! The tyrant is dead!
If he were lucky enough to survive an assault on the bastard, he’d be hailed as Cuba’s new liberator, take his place in history alongside José Martí. Goyo bent his head and recited an Our Father and two Hail Marys. He was seeking inspiration, a definitive direction, but no answer came. So it is for your own glory that you contemplate this? The voice was his, and not his, metallic and oddly feminine. I want to redeem my life, Goyo answered. I want it to mean something. He felt a sudden, unexpected tenderness for his broken body. How fragile it’d proved against life’s slow river of ruin.
Goyo hailed a cab and headed to Central Park. The trees were in their last summer fullness, and a couple of softball teams in bank logo jerseys battled it out on the Great Lawn. Everywhere, old people with their polished-apple skin sat on benches with newspapers and books. In another month, the leaves would turn an ember red in the unforgiving chill of fall.
“Pull over here.”
“We get ticket!” the driver protested.
“I’ll pay, don’t worry.” Goyo flashed a wad of cash and stepped outside. He wanted to breathe in the world one last time, take notice of everything he usually ignored—the resinous air, the immaculate gray of the clouds. A turkey vulture peered down at him from the top of a pin oak. With a great flap of its wings, it rose high into the sky before wheeling away. Goyo got back in the cab and returned home.
The contractor was on the sidewalk, shouting into his cell phone. He flung out his arms in exasperation.
“Where’s Víctor?” Goyo asked.
“Inside with his fucking feather duster. Listen, we got business to discuss.”
Goyo’s temples ached, and the pain was spreading to the back of his skull.
“Hey, you don’t look so good.”
“Son of a bitch,” Goyo managed to gasp.
“Let’s get you upstairs. I got the elevator fixed.”
Johnny helped Goyo inside, then up to his apartment, where Víctor put him to bed. Goyo was sweating so profusely that his clothes left stains on the coverlet. It couldn’t be another heart attack, he reassured himself, because his chest didn’t hurt. He closed his eyes and tried to steady his breathing, to tamp down the anxiety he felt. Víctor propped Goyo’s feet on a pillow and pressed a cool cloth to his forehead. A swirl of colored dots swam beneath his eyelids before he passed out.
When he awoke hours later, it was dark out and a mug of chamomile tea steamed on the nightstand. This meant that Víctor was nearby, probably watching reruns of Gaucho Love and wearing one of Luisa’s old bathrobes. A votive candle flickered on the dresser. Goyo shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts and prepare himself for the day ahead.
Víctor entered quietly and handed Goyo an envelope addressed to him in an old-fashioned script. It was from Adelina’s son, the tyrant’s namesake, now nearing retirement as an ophthalmologist. He’d enclosed a letter from his mother, writing from another century, a suicide note, hidden from him for almost seventy years. There were two things Adelina wanted Goyo to know: first, that she loved him (ay, his singing, aching heart!) and had been a fool to leave him; second, that the tyrant may have seduced her but she’d never cared for him, not for a second. Goyo pressed the letter to his chest. His grief strained every muscle in his back and groin. The tyrant had seduced Adelina, stolen his one great love, disgracing her for any other. And Goyo’s own arrogance had prevented him from saving her. He folded and kissed the letter—a fragile, transparent blue—and slipped it into his wallet. Then he hobbled to the bathroom and began the day’s ablutions.
NATY: |
We are the unofficial hosts for artists’ parties in Havana. Everyone who’s anyone comes to our rooftop. |
SIMÓN: |
Bunch of freeloaders. |
NATY: |
I think of our place as a Paris salon except we’re in the tropics. |
SIMÓN: |
Don’t think it’s easy playing host to these queens. They don’t trust their own mothers. They never tell me what I need to know. |
NATY: |
The other night, the singing and dancing got so out of control that our neighbors demanded to be let in! We ran out of ropa vieja! |
SIMÓN: |
It’s my job to keep tabs on these sons of bitches. Who’s meeting whom, who’s going abroad and why. They avoid my questions, drink our whiskey and rum, and then they— |
NATY: |
We’re living in a dream, a beautiful dream . . . |
There were sixty-three people in El Comandante’s entourage, all on the same flight. Fernando had argued against this, fearing that a single act of sabotage could take out the island’s top brass. But if he was going down, the tyrant retorted, then every last bastard was going down with him. He regarded his fellow travelers. Many of the faces were unfamiliar to him, a new generation of bureaucrats and ass lickers. Not a true warrior among them. He squinted at an enormous negrito four rows back. His face was a beefy blue, his chin a shelf of bone. The man returned El Líder’s stare with a respectful nod. For all he knew, this giant could be anyone from the minister of health to the baritone chosen to sing Cuba’s national anthem at the United Nations.
El Comandante desultorily thumbed through his speech. He hated reading from scripts. Nothing was more boring than knowing exactly what he was going to say next. It was only after Fernando had shown him a video of himself rambling incoherently at a recent rally that he’d agreed to consider a few talking points. What he needed now was a nap; just a short nap and he would wake up on the razor’s edge again, his legendary memory intact.
The plane shuddered as it banked between stormy clouds. Even with the best mechanics on the planet, these old Russian planes held up poorly. They looked decent enough—spiffy with the island’s flag freshly painted on their tails—but the engines coughed like consumptives and frequently stalled in midair, causing precipitous drops that had a man chewing his own ass. El Comandante bit his tongue as the plane dropped a thousand feet. He focused on his toes to keep from throwing up. They were pinched in fancy Italian shoes that sported brass buckles instead of laces. If he could, he’d trade them in for a solid pair of hooves.
El Conejo appeared at his side, his complexion tinged green. He hated flying, and suffered from motion sickness on even the shortest of flights.
“You look a mess, hombre.”
“Thank you for your concern, Jefe.” El Conejo pulled a perfumed handkerchief from his vest and dabbed at his perspiring hairline. “There are a few, eh, security matters I wish to discuss with you.”
“Who’s trying to kill me this time?”
“An old faction of Omega 7 is mobilizing for your visit.”
“Pathetic bastards. They haven’t done a goddamn thing since the seventies.”
“They’ve taken on younger recruits, expert marksmen, veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” The adviser, nostrils flaring, pressed the handkerchief to his cheek. He stared at his boss like a forlorn dog.
El Comandante was losing interest. “More security, right.” He tilted his seat back, shorthand for This conversation is over and bring it up again at your peril.
The stewardess approached them in her snug carnelian uniform. She’d competed in the 2006 Miss Latin America pageant and came in second only to Miss Venezuela, who’d undergone head-to-toe plastic surgery. El Comandante wasn’t averse to a pair of inflated tits, but he hated how artificial they felt. Years ago, he’d ruptured a Mexican soap opera star’s rack during vigorous foreplay.
“Cafecitos, gentlemen?”
“You’re too generous,” the tyrant flirted.
The stewardess waited until he finished his espresso, then placed his cup on a silver tray. El Conejo’s eyes bulged from the caffeine. Soon they’d be flying over Miami. El Líder was inclined to order the pilot to empty the latrines over his enemies’ liver-spotted heads. He adjusted the ventilation fan, which emitted the faint, unmistakable scent of borscht. It stoked his appetite for the lunch that everyone but him was getting—lechón with rice, beans, and fried plantains. He got a goddamn salad topped with two shriveled strips of chicken.
The pilot announced that they were flying through an electrical storm and everyone, including the stewardesses, needed to take their seats. When Mamá visited the tyrant during thunderstorms, she mostly complained about her inability to track down Papá in the afterlife. “He’s hiding from me,” she would grumble, adjusting her slack, ghostly breasts. “Probably shacked up with some cualquierita.” The despot had hated hearing about his parents’ marital problems when they were alive, much less so posthumously.
El Comandante plucked a loose thread from his sleeve. His uniform drooped on his shrinking frame. He’d had the waist taken in to the measurements of his youth, but he’d refused to have his pant legs recuffed, and so they dragged along the floor collecting dust. Fernando even had the nerve to suggest that his brother wear the same ridiculous elevator shoes that he sported. The tyrant still regretted allowing his tailor of thirty-six years to emigrate. After his departure, dozens of other tailors vied for the job, but none had a fraction of the talent of Amado Cantún.
A pinkish crane flew by his window. El Comandante followed its flight path until it vanished south. He wrenched his neck trying to see if anyone else had spotted the spindly bird. But everyone was in a postprandial stupor, with the exception of a sole workaholic hunched over his laptop. The tyrant racked his brain for any omens he may have received concerning cranes, but none came to mind. A wise man in the Niger had once predicted for him “a fiery death in the skies.” Could this be the time? What none of the many auguries had foreseen was the brutal truth: his rage at a canicular old age.
• • •
In New York, the skies were drizzling and gray. El Comandante descended the ramp of the Soviet plane and was met by a sea of black umbrellas. He had the disconcerting feeling that he’d landed in the wrong city, in the former Eastern Bloc, perhaps, on a typically dreary day. Not until he had both feet on the tarmac did he smell the danger, unmistakable as carrion.
“Fernando!” he bleated like a lost boy.
“Aquí, hermano.” His brother raised his arm and waved him forward.
With a prearranged signal, four bodyguards in bulletproof vests surrounded El Líder and lifted him toward the terminal. A Caribbean steel drum band was in full swing. Die-hard leftists from around the region erupted into applause as he entered. The dashing revolutionary they’d all hoped to see was a decrepit viejito, but they were pleased to welcome him nonetheless. The tyrant inched forward, his mind empty of everything but the suspense of surviving another attempt on his life. This was the last real power left to him: to thwart his enemies to the bitter end.
As the crowd clamored for their hero, a hail of bullets shattered the huge terminal window. People shrieked, scattering and falling to the floor. Fernando’s men wrestled the assassin to the ground—some buzz-cut punk with crippled Spanish insulting El Líder at the top of his lungs. How the boy freed himself nobody knew, but he managed to jam a handgun into his mouth and blow out his brains. The tyrant took a deep breath and turned his attention outside. A flock of cormorants had gathered in the skies like a jumble of ideograms, endlessly diving and lamenting in their old women’s voices. Then as if on cue, the birds screeched out to sea, toward the equator, to a distance measurable only by light.