The guard shack stood empty. The wooden arm barred the entrance but the exit side was open. As the T-Bird wobbled and wavered on the wind-blasted bridge, I heard the latest advisory. A storm surge of fifteen to twenty feet was predicted across Miami Beach from the ocean to the bay. Those who had not evacuated were told it was too late and warned to stay off the road and hunker down where they were. Were my mother, the Goldsteins, and my pets in a safe place? Was there a safe place?
Darkening clouds masked the sun, and the sky glowed an eerie shade of maroon red. Palm trees bent in the wind, pliant fronds thrashing like warning flags in the gale. As I approached his home, I saw Reyes’s electronic gates wide open. The Libertad danced on black waves at its moorings behind the house, despite more than a dozen lines that tied it down. His Range Rover stood in the driveway. He was closing the lift gate.
I pulled up behind his car. He frowned. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he shouted, above the wind. “It’s rime to leave.”
“I want the diary!” I followed him as he darted back into the house. The huge hallway seemed eerie with all the windows now shuttered.
“I packed it in the trunk,” he said impatiently. “We must leave.”
“No, I want to see it.”
“Don’t you understand, have you heard the reports? The storm is nearly upon us!”
“I’m tired of being put off,” I said stubbornly. “I want the diary.”
“Are you crazy?” He snatched a stack of files from his desk and threw them into a valise. “Hand me those,” he said, gesturing impatiently toward several small silver-framed photos on a shelf behind his desk. I picked one up, of a small blond boy astride a pony. Another boy, with Reyes’s eyes, stood solemnly beside the animal, holding its lead.
“Is that you?” I had not seen it before.
“Yes.” He glanced at the photo for a moment. “My boyhood in Camagiiey.”
“The other boy?”
“My American cousin. He was visiting.”
“I didn’t know you had relatives here.”
“Is there a Cuban who does not have American relatives?” He reached for the photo of him and the President.
As he did so, I saw he wore a gun in a shoulder holster. That, or something he had said, reminded me of the elusive detail I had been trying to remember. What was it? Out in the main hall the front door blew open, and the wind found its way into the house.
“We must leave,” he said.
“I want to get out of here as much as you do,” I said. “Please, just give me my fathers diary and I’ll go.”
Then I realized it was not the wind in the front hall. Reyes heard the sounds at the same moment I did. A cane.
In the process of removing a commercial-size checkbook from a cabinet, Reyes swiveled toward the door.
Bravo stood there, one hand on his cane, a gun in the other. “What are you doing?” I asked him.
“You!” Reyes said.
“Give her Antonio’s diario,” Bravo said and grinned. His smile had no humor. Rain drummed against the shutters.
Reyes glared at him. “Get out of my house!”
“Call the police,” Bravo said gleefully.
Reyes continued to glare.
“Give her the diario.” Bravo turned to me with a little bow. “He cannot. Why? Because I have it here.” His teeth gleamed in a wide smile. He used the barrel of the gun to lift his guayabera, exposing a weathered book stuffed in his waistband.
“I told you, Montero. You would not listen to me. Just like your father. I could not save him, but I will save you from this would-be tyrant. He would have killed you.”
“You are in league with Castro,” Reyes said, his face twisted in rage.
“Perhaps Castro sent Antonio’s words to Miami to stop you.” Bravo shrugged. “So be it. Perhaps for the only time, Castro has done something for the Cuban people. The asesino you sent to kill Armando Gutierrez and steal the diario read Antonio’s words and would not deliver it to you, even though he knew he would not be paid. He is Cuban first, that is what you misunderstood.”
He turned to me. “When you publish your father’s words, the world will know—and Reyes is finished. Ask him what happened to the young rubio, the boy who joined us in Camaguey. They told the parents he died in prison.” Bravo shook his head slowly.
“Pervert!” He spit out the word.
And that was when I remembered. Ohmigod.
“Watson Kelly, one of the missing boys, called his parents from a pay phone in the downtown arcade, the one you own.” Reyes, eyes half closed, lips working, said nothing. “Chades Randolph was last seen coming here to work for you. You know what happened to them, don’t you?” I remembered the questions he had casually raised about the investigation. His attitude change when the task force was appointed.
“He is a pervert!” Bravo said.
“Where are they?”
Reyes ignored my question, his eyes deep wells of darkness.
“You are both crazy,” he said, and glanced toward the shuttered windows, resounding with pounding rain. “I suggest we save ourselves from the storm first and continue this discussion when it has passed.”
The lights flickered and went out. The power was gone.
“You see!” he said angrily. He was barely visible in the shadows. The only light filtered through the thick glass of two decorative porthole windows high on the wall. Bravo shoved his gun back into a holster clipped to his waistband. He pulled out the book and presented it to me.
“For you, Montero. The truth, a legacy from your father.”
I held it in my hands. At last. I wanted to take it and run but where? The wind might tear it from me. I wanted to go to my car for my bag, my flashlight. But when I cracked the door, it took the three of us to close it against the storm.
We were trapped. The bridge would be impassable.
“We need candles, a lantern,” I said, clutching the diary. Reyes led us through his huge kitchen into the pantry. He found some candles and a powerful beam flashlight, a big one encased in plastic.
We returned to his office where he stood the flashlight straight up on the bar, pointing to the ceiling, its beam illuminating the room in a soft glow.
Gravel, stones, and tree branches barraged the house. My mind was racing, full of questions. Reyes seemed strangely calm, almost suave. He offered us something from the bar and, when we declined, selected a bottle of Scotch from the shelf and mixed himself a drink. I sat on the arm of a chair, fingers curled around the cracked leather of the book held next to my body. Bravo took a chair nearby.
“We are together for the duration,” Reyes said, raising his glass. “As politics makes strange bedfellows, so does the storm. We should be sociable.”
The house shuddered in the scream and boom of the wind. Walls shook and reverberated. “Do not worry,” Reyes said. “There is no reason to be alarmed. This house will withstand anything.” He tuned in a battery-powered radio. The storm, indeed, was upon us. The house was being battered now by flying debris.
As we sat in semidarkness, a newscaster interrupted the storm coverage with a warning.
“All emergency personnel, police and fire, have been ordered to seek shelter for their own safety. No calls for assistance will be answered. I repeat, no emergency calls will be answered.
“Miami,” he added, “you are on your own.”
The voice of authority had just informed us that there was none. The words filled my heart with dread. What about accidents? Sick people, heart attacks, those injured and bleeding in the storm? We were alone. Reyes finished his drink.
“Britt,” he said calmly. “Give me the diary.”
“What?” I was startled. “It’s mine. I’ve waited all these years.”
Bravo struggled to his feet. “This is the man who betrayed your father!”
The house rocked. I remembered that at its height, the hurricane of my childhood screamed with the high-pitched shrieks of a thousand women. Yet this storm rumbled with a deep-throated roar, like a freight train. Each storm must have its own distinctive voice.
“If you fear that your home is becoming unsafe,” the newscaster was saying, his voice compassionate, “hunker down with your family in an interior closet or bathroom. Use mattresses for cover.” I prayed that those I loved were safe.
Reyes snatched the flashlight from the bar with an abrupt move. I thought he was leaving the room. Instead he stepped swiftly toward me, shining it in my face. I couldn’t see. Was this how it was in a prison interrogation?
“You will never read this book,” he said. I shrank back blinking. “You were stupid to come here, stupid and naive like your father. Let me tell you about your father; he was a worm.”
“I trusted you.”
“So did your father. Only fools trust.”
Something heavy crashed upstairs and the house began to shake, as though pounded by a bulldozer. As Reyes reacted, directing his light toward the stairs, Jorge stepped forward, gun in hand.
“I will not permit this. This history must not be repeated. I cannot allow it to happen again. Get behind me, Montero.”
Reyes cursed and flicked off the flashlight, plunging us into a black well as the house rocked and moaned. Bursts of gunfire lit up the dark, four, five shots almost drowned out by the bricks and roofing tiles slamming the outside walls like machine-gun fire. I hit the floor. Glass shattered and I heard Jorge draw in a shuddering breath and fall. The wind whined and whistled, finding cracks in the metal shutters.
He lay near me somewhere on the floor. I reached out to touch him and felt the warm blood on his shirt.
“No, no,” he whispered. “I want to die in Cuba.”
The flashlight beam blinded me before I even thought to grope for his gun. Reyes kicked it away, standing over us, unhurt, breathing hard. “Loco old fool!” he said.
“Montero,” Bravo mumbled.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Antonio…”
“Call an ambulance,” I muttered to Reyes.
“There are no ambulances, no police, no doctors. Remember? Just us.”
“How could you do this?” I said tearfully.
“You saw,” Reyes said, indignantly. “He tried to kill me.”
Jorge’s body quivered, he was gasping. I found his maimed hand, caught the other, and held them both. “Give me some light,” I pleaded. “I have to stop the bleeding.”
“Too late,” he said coldly. “The old fool is dead.”
He was right.
Jorge Bravo was a poor man compared to Reyes and his riches. Like my father, he spent his energy, his health, and finally gave his life to free Cuba. But quick death by firing squad had to be easier than thirty years of frustration, heartbreak, and defeat. Bravo had no political plans. He did not feign patriotism to make money. He did not talk about freedom, he struggled for it, not on the streets of Miami, but in Cuba. He did the best he could.
Green lightning flashed outside the porthole windows, illuminating the trees as they twisted, writhed, and toppled. The house shuddered. Wood ripped and splintered.
I ran to the front door. Reyes followed with the light. Rivulets of water were creeping in over the top. “Don’t open it!” he shouted. The door buckled in the wind. We pushed a heavy bookcase against it, but the roaring gale began to move the bookcase, inching it toward us.
I ran back to Bravo, stumbling across his body in the dark. I tugged at his shoulders, trying to move him into a sitting position, hoping to somehow drag him onto the sofa. I didn’t want him wet, exposed. But he was too heavy and the front of my blouse grew sticky with his blood.
One of the small round windows exploded. Rain and debris peppered the air like bullets. Metal shutters were snapping off.
“The bathroom,” Reyes said urgently from behind me. I picked up the radio, following the beam of his light as we fled to an interior bathroom with no windows.
“Mattresses,” I shouted, “we need mattresses!”
He ran to another room and returned dragging a twin-size mattress. “Help me!” he said.
I followed him to another small bedroom at the back of the house. His light skimmed the ceiling. It was sagging. Reyes cursed wildly as we tore the mattress off the bed, pushing and pulling it out the door as the ceiling split open like overripe fruit. We hauled it into the bathroom and slammed the door.
The burnished gold of the lavish bathroom fixtures glowed in the flashlight’s beam. From the other side of the door came the unearthly sounds of shutters being ripped away by an angry, scratching, howling beast.
My ears kept popping from the pressure.
“¡Dios mio! This cannot be. This cannot be.” Reyes was hyperventilating.
“We have to keep the door from opening,” I muttered. Like a wild animal, the storm was loose in the house, crashing, smashing, and tearing. He kept his shoulder to the door. I lay on the floor, braced against the sink, feet pressed against the door. The wind pushed and we pushed back. I listened, ready to scramble into the tub and crouch beneath a mattress if the ceding gave way. “We may not live through this,” I cried. “What about the boys? Where are they? Did you betray my father? Tell me the truth about what happened to him!”
He grunted, turning the other shoulder to the door. “Truth? That’s all your father wanted. He did not see the big picture: politics, countries, governments, survival. You are like him. You miss the big picture.” He laughed, a vile sound that mingled with those of the storm. “You babble on about truth while the storm of the century rages around us, when survival is all that is important. He did not survive.
“But I will! I am a survivor. Always,” he ranted. “The Bay of Pigs, the cold war, business and politics. I survived them all. I have Secret Service clearance! I occupied the podium with the President when he last visited Miami. I have been to the White House!”
“How will you explain Bravo’s body?”
I strained to hear as he lowered his voice. “People disappear in a storm like this. They are never found. Swept away. This is a perfect time for somebody to disappear.”
Despite the suffocating heat in the small room, I felt chilled. Did the barrage seem to be subsiding? The pounding wind and the roar were no longer as loud. The eye of the storm must be approaching: my chance to escape. My only chance. I could make it to my car and across the bridge before the second half of the storm hit. I could find a safe place to ride out the rest of the hurricane.
I got to my knees, in a crouch. Reyes stretched and stepped away from the door.
More terrified of him than of the storm, I flung the door open and ran out. The darkness was pitch black, the water ankle-and then knee-deep. Splashing. He came after me.
“Wait,” he shouted. I him heard crash against a wall. I groped in the darkness. The shutters were gone. The windows were out, the storm was in. Green lightning flashed again, in the distance. The roof had peeled away and one wall was gone. It was raining inside. “Wait, stop!” Reyes shouted, lunging after me.
The stench was horrible. Water was rising. The sewer lines have ruptured, I thought, nearly gagging as I kept moving, his flashlight beam dancing behind me. Lightning flashed again, and I saw another face, in front of me. A skull, grinning. I recoiled, screaming.
Reyes stumbled over a fallen timber and his flashlight fell into the water. Floating and bobbing, driven by the wind and storm surge, its strong beam illuminated horror after horror like a macabre light show. I was hallucinating. Was I dead? Bones, skulls, bodies in various stages of decomposition and mummification. Staring up in terror at the shattered walls, I saw limbs, arms and legs, dangling from the crawl space beneath the broken roof.
Oh God. I was alive. They were real.
He saw them too. With a cry of anger and despair, he caught my right arm and ripped the diary from my waistband. I fought to keep it, thrashing off-balance in the stinking water, the horrifying tableau still playing all around us at the whim of the spotlight s wavering beam.
He hit me in the face, so hard I saw an exploding sun and fell back onto a water-soaked chair. Dazed, I heard him at the splintered front door. “No! What have you done?”
Sobbing, gagging, I lurched to my feet and chased the bobbing light, caught it, picked it up, and stumbled toward the door. I heard the engine of the Range Rover. I saw it, covered with tree branches that fell away as it rolled slowly out of the driveway, picking up speed. I had to stop him. Knees shaking, I tried to find my car but couldn’t see it. Branches, debris, and fallen trees were everywhere.
Taking a deep breath, I steadied the light and slogged through water to where my T-Bird should be. Instead there was an impenetrable thicket, a mountain of green branches as high as a house. My T-Bird was beneath the fallen ficus tree that had stood sentry in the courtyard, flattened like a smashed toy.
The Range Rover was gone, its four-wheel drive somehow navigating the obstacles, downed trees, water, and floating lumber. The wind was receding to a whisper, the sky awash in stars, more than I had ever seen before, because now there was no other light to diminish them. Suddenly I became aware of the sound of high-pitched wails. Panic swelled in my chest. The storm was returning. Only after several moments did I realize that it was the sound of burglar alarms from other houses on the island.
But the storm would be back.
I struggled through the branches to reach the cellular phone in my car, and my gun, in case he came back. Bruised and cut, my knuckles bleeding, I managed to reach the bag with the phone. Nothing. Only static. Then I realized that even if I could call for help, none would come. I cut myself on broken glass but wrestled my portable radio out through a broken window. No way to reach the gun in the glove compartment.
The starry sky and the water were absolutely calm now, with an unnatural beauty. I clutched the radio, my only link to the world. I would have to conserve the batteries, I thought, wading through water and wreckage, alarms sounding around me, the entire island empty.
The Libertad was splintered wreckage, scattered by wind and water. Poles and power lines were down, roof riles everywhere.
The thought of reentering Reyes’s house of horror made my skin crawl, but the radio warned that the second half of the storm was about to strike and would be just as vicious. The sky began to close in again. The night grew darker, the stars vanished, and the wind stirred ominously. Where to go? Back to that bathroom? I would rather die. I shuddered convulsively. But I must survive this, I thought, to tell what he has done.
The house across the street, away from the water, on higher ground, had a collapsed patio structure but looked otherwise intact. I knocked hopefully and tried the doorbell. No one there. Locked and shuttered. I checked under the mat for a key. Nothing. As the wind picked up, something at the side of the house began to slam back and forth.
I skirted the house. Across the street the bay seethed and began to rise again. The slamming continued as I trained the flashlight. Something moving. A dog, a golden retriever, whining, running in and out of his doggie door as the winds began to regain their strength-His owners must have left him behind when they evacuated. I called out, hoping he was friendly.
He gave a small bark and came running, tad frantically wagging, as glad to see me as I was to see him. If I can get inside with the dog, I thought, I’ll be safe. On hands and knees, I crawled in through the doggie door. He followed and I secured it from the inside.
He wore a red scarf and a collar with a tag that said his name was Waldo. We sat together on the kitchen floor, both whimpering.
Sick at heart, I thought of Charles Randolph, Butch, and the others. Resisting their images, I forced myself to my feet.
There were matches and candles on the kitchen table. I lit one and put it carefully on a china saucer. No time to be careless with fire, with nowhere to run and no fire department to respond. Rummaging in the kitchen cabinets, I found some cognac and drank straight from the bottle. I thought of Jorge Bravo and drank some more. I found dog food but no manual can opener, and the electric one was useless. Everything would spoil anyway, so I fed Waldo sliced turkey and cold cuts from the refrigerator. Then I drank more cognac. The storm howled and shrieked around us, as Waldo and I climbed up onto the big formal dining room table and went to sleep.
By dawn the storm had gone and the alarms had died, leaving an eerie silence. I stepped outside to a city changed forever.