Early the next morning Barbara was waiting for me on the stoop outside my office. She called just after dawn, waking me, and ordered me to meet her there. Her face was impassive and rigid as she watched me approach.
She looked so out of place I would have been scared of her if I didn’t know her. From the cigar ashes scattered around the steps, I could tell she had been waiting awhile. I opened the door, turned off the alarm, and ushered her in.
Barbara scanned the room and seemed to dismiss the office waiting area as beneath her scrutiny. “Two men in suits were asking for me yesterday at the marina,” she said, sitting on the edge of Leonardo’s desk. “I don’t even know men who wear suits. They must have come from Betancourt.”
I put on some coffee and opened the blinds. “Who told you this?”
“My son Jose told me when I got home last night. The guys who work around the marina told him. They thought the men were there to make trouble for me.”
“What did your friends at the marina tell them?”
“Nothing,” Barbara answered proudly. “We all stick together. Like a family.”
“Those men will be back. This is just the beginning.” I spoke over the tap as I rinsed two coffee cups. “Yesterday they might have just wanted to intimidate you, but who knows? They’ll start watching your children, your home. If they want to find you, they will eventually.”
“I know that. I’m not stupid, Lupe.”
I poured coffee, and she accepted a cup. I figured a pregnant woman who smoked and drank rum probably hadn’t sworn off caffeine, and I was right.
Michelle was running out of time, and now so was Barbara. It was just a matter of time before someone came after me. I suddenly realized I’d lost the luxury of speculating whether or not to go to Cuba.
When I looked at Barbara, I saw she shared my thoughts. “I want to go, Lupe,” she said simply. “I have to finish this.”
I knew what my answer would be. I was as trapped as she was. “I watched the Weather Channel this morning while I was getting dressed,” I offered. “There are no storms around.”
Barbara sneered. ‘Weather channel? Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t watch any weather channel! I smell the sea and know all the storms! I don’t need any fancy people with fancy educations telling me about the weather. I have this!” She pointed at her nose.
I was taken aback and just stared at her. Her dark eyes shining, Barbara suddenly threw her head back and roared with laughter. “I had you going for a second, didn’t I?”
We were planning to enter communist Cuba illegally, and she was seeing how gullible I was. Great.
“There’s no point waiting,” I said, and her smile disappeared. “Betancourt could send someone for us anytime. We should make preparations and leave tomorrow.”
“I need money to get the boat ready,” she said, extending her hand.
Barbara was as plain and unadorned in her speech as in her manner. I had come to appreciate and respect that. Maybe the Miami social circles I moved in were so shallow that I was moved by any kind of directness.
At the same time, there was something mercurial and volatile about her, and it scared me. I opened the office safe and pulled out several hundred dollars. “Here,” I said. “That should be enough for the boat expenses.”
“I also need money for Alberto’s relatives, and for provisions to give them,” she said. The bills I already gave her looked dwarfed and tiny in her huge hand.
I reached for the money and started to speak. She interrupted. “I’ll explain what I mean. I’ll explain everything before we go.”
Another couple hundred was enough to satisfy her, and she raised her loose white cotton shirt and tucked the cash into her expansive brassiere. I caught a glimpse of her belly. Unless she was carrying twins, she was definitely farther into her pregnancy than I had thought.
“By the way, do you get seasick?” she asked, rearranging her clothes. “The trip can be rough.”
“I never have before,” I lied, trying to keep the nausea out of my voice. “But don’t worry, I’ll hold up my end. But now I need to know everything about the trips you took with Alberto. And I mean that, Barbara—if we’re going to get out of this alive, I’m going to have to know as much as you do.”
“I understand,” Barbara said. She looked at me strangely. “You’re more scared than I am, but that’s okay. Remember, the sea will be your friend as long as you treat her with respect.”
“My father always said that.”
Barbara smiled and grasped my shoulder maternally. Her grip was alarmingly strong. Standing over Leonardo’s desk, she delicately picked up his papers and placed them neatly on his chair. Lifting up her blouse, she took out a long roll of papers tucked in her skirt. I shuddered when I saw again how distended her belly was.
She spread the papers on my desk, and I saw that they were sea charts. “I came prepared in case you agreed to go,” she said.
Bending over the charts, she identified the long island of Cuba and pointed at a small spot east of Havana marked in pencil. “We landed here,” she went on. “A little fishing village called Isabela de Sagua, in the province of Las Villas.”
I took a closer look. The town was on the northern part of the island, just to the south of Sagua la Grande, which I had heard of from Papi, and almost halfway between the provinces of Havana and Oriente. It looked like an ideal spot to land, protected from the open sea by a string of small cays lining the coast. The promontory the town rested on reminded me of Cape Cod, though on a much smaller scale.
“Why there?”
“Because Alberto has relatives there, and because Betancourt suggested it for his own reasons. The two came together. Alberto knew those waters from when he was small. He came from a family of fishermen, and he used to fish with them there.”
She handed me a small black notebook. “Alberto always took notes so he was the only one who knew what happened on the trips. He had a feeling he might need it one day. But there’s a problem. I think he took down the notes in code.”
It looked so innocent, like a little kid’s diary, but to Elio Betancourt it was lethal, and Alberto knew it. If Marisol Velez wasn’t so honest, Betancourt’s ass would have been partially covered.
“What do you mean, you think he wrote in code?”
Barbara stared at me confrontationally. “You’re smart, you figure it out.” Her quick anger diminishing already, she stared at the charts. “I can’t read, all right?”
“But how are we—”
“I can’t read that book, and I can’t read the names of the places on this chart. But I can read the chart better than anyone,” she said, jabbing a meaty finger into the Atlantic Ocean. “The coastline, the currents, the sandbars. I was raised by sailors, and I know the sea.”
I opened Alberto’s notebook and tried to read the entries. The writing was in a sort of hieroglyphics. I decided not to waste time on it. I locked the notebook in the office safe.
“So I was right?” she asked, watching me. “He wrote in code?”
“I have no idea what it says,” I admitted.
“Alberto was a smart man,” Barbara said admiringly. “You see? You can read, but you can’t read about what he did.”
“He was a genius. He was so great that he outsmarted us out of information that could save our lives.”
The front door clattered open behind us and we turned as one, both scared out of our wits. It was Leonardo, and he arrived at work to see a huge pregnant woman staring at him with her fists raised. He looked at me uncertainly and started moving back out the door.
“Its all right, Leonardo,” I said. “Barbara, this is my cousin. He works with me here.”
Barbara lowered her fists and extended her hand. Leonardo winced when she shook it. “Am I interrupting anything?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. I didn’t want him in on this. We were moving into a territory where knowing what we planned and what we had done without reporting it was borderline illegal. “But maybe we should move into my office.”
Leonardo couldn’t take his eyes off Barbara; he was transfixed. “No, no, no,” he said quickly. “You can use my desk. I’ll go into the other room and close the door. I missed a workout yesterday, anyway.”
I thanked him as he quickly disappeared into the workout room. “That’s an attractive boy,” Barbara said, nudging me.
“I’ll set you up with him if we live through this,” I said. “But, for now, keep talking. How did you know when to leave for Isabela de Sagua?”
“You’re serious about setting me up with your cousin?” she asked in reply. She saw I wasn’t biting, and sighed. “All right. Betancourt would call Alberto two days before we had to leave. It was always the same: Alberto would go to Betancourt’s office late at night to pick up an envelope with money for expenses and to give to his contacts in Cuba. Then Alberto would get the Mamita ready—fill her tanks, get food and ice, everything.”
“So you were the only ones involved?”
“Well, my boy Jose would check out the engines. He’s a mechanic, a good one. His father, Eduardo, used to fix his own engines on the fishing boat.”
“Then did you ever consider taking Jose along on one of the trips to Cuba?” I asked. “It would seem like a good precaution, in case anything went wrong with the boat.”
Barbara shook her head with such violence that wisps of hair escaped from her braid. “You know how I got Jose and me out of Cuba,” she said. “Santa Barbara was with me at that time, but you don’t ask the gods for two miracles. The trip is dangerous, Lupe, don’t fool yourself about that. I tempted fate too many times, and my luck will run out soon—that’s my business. But to take my son back to Cuba after what I risked to bring him to America …”
I saw her point. “Did Alberto agree with you?”
“No, we had big fights about that. So big that one time he went without me, and he learned his lesson then!” She spoke almost as though Alberto were in the room with us. “He saw he couldn’t do it without me, so he shut up about Jose. Besides, Jose doesn’t know where we go. He thinks I go fishing. I don’t want him or my other children to know anything about the babies—that’s my secret.”
Somehow I felt touched that Barbara—the adventurer, with all her bluster—worried what her kids thought about her. At the same time, I had to consider: This woman kept secrets.
“All right, go on. How did the trips start?”
“When the Mamita was ready, Alberto would tell me what time to meet him at the dock. We would usually leave at noon so we could be at the marina in Key West by late afternoon. We waited there until after midnight, resting; then we set sail for Cuba before first light. We motored like hell, and the Mamita bums gas like a bitch because of the special engines Alberto installed, so we had to top off the tanks in Key West before we left. Gas is rationed in Cuba, you know.”
“How did you get through the Cuban and American patrols?” I asked. The thought of being captured by Cuban soldiers filled me with dread.
“We were careful.”
She had nothing else to say, so I got up for more coffee to keep myself from screaming. “Who met you at Isabela de Sagua?” I asked when I brought the cups back to the desk.
“Two of Alberto’s relatives, two men, always the same ones.” She blew on her coffee. “Alberto brought them provisions along with Betancourt’s cash payment. The payments got higher over time. I think Alberto had to bribe them not to turn him in. Family is family, but things are bad in Cuba. You can’t trust anyone.”
“So Betancourt hired Alberto to pick up babies in the very province that Alberto grew up in?” I asked.
Barbara nodded. “Alberto said it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him in his entire life.”
Alberto was wrong. “What happened after you met the relatives?”
“We anchored in a little bay just before the town, pretty well hidden. Then the two men would take the provisions we brought them. Alberto would go off in a dinghy with them while I stayed on board. A couple of hours later he would come back with a baby. We waited until dark and then left.”
“You don’t know where he went to get those babies?” I asked nervously. “You never went with him?”
“Never. I always stayed in the boat,” Barbara said, a hint of dismay entering her voice.
“So it was always pretty smooth. You never spent so much as twenty-four hours in Cuba.”
“Never,” she said. “We would get there before first light, and leave after sunset. It was always the same.”
“How many trips do you think you made?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The sea is worse in winter, so we didn’t go very much then. I went to Cuba with Alberto for …” She looked at me as though expecting me to finish her sentence for her. “Three or four years now. It wasn’t regular—sometimes in the summer we’d go two or three times a month, and I missed some trips when I had babies myself. So I went … maybe twenty times.”
As if on cue, Leonardo groaned from the next room. Even behind the closed door, it sounded as if baby number twenty-one was well on the way.
Barbara demurely asked where our office bathroom was, then excused herself quietly. She was a bundle of contradictions. I didn’t really think I had any reliable answers from her about the baby-selling scheme, since Alberto purposefully kept her in the dark. What amazed me was that they had made the trip twenty times and that Betancourt had arranged as many adoptions. There were wealthy Cubans all through Miami buying babies from Cuba. And I still didn’t know precisely where those children came from.
There was another question that troubled me, and when Barbara returned from the rest room it was my first priority.
“Barbara, when I first saw you, I thought you were about six months pregnant,” I said delicately. “How far along are you really?”
“Six, seven months. Maybe more, I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell when you’re nursing and pregnant at the same time.”
Leonardo grunted loudly again. You could have tape-recorded that sound and used it to teach Lamaze classes. I hoped Barbara’s baby didn’t hear and get the wrong idea.
“Don’t worry,” Barbara said. “I’ve made this trip up to eight months pregnant. If anything happens, I know what to do.”
Planned Parenthood would be terrified. Barbara Perez was a baby machine. The La Leche League crowd should have hired her as its poster girl. And I didn’t even want to know what she meant by saying she “knew what to do.”
“Do you have any babies?” she asked. “A husband?”
“Neither,” I said quickly.
I didn’t consider for an instant telling Barbara my views on marriage—it would be a waste of time, and this was no time to make her think I might be unhinged. She may have lived an unusual life, but I could tell she had conventional ideas about women and their children. Barbara had the Cuban view: that motherhood was and should be every woman’s greatest goal in life. Sometimes I wonder if it was this pressure that drove Lourdes into the religious life.
My poor parents: they certainly got shortchanged in the way their daughters dealt with marriage and motherhood. One was a nun, one was divorced from a scoundrel, and the third was a confirmed single girl.
I wasn’t against marriage in general, just for me in particular. After Fatima’s fiasco, then working hundreds of domestic cases over the years, I saw that my parents’ happy marriage was a rarity. To give up my unwedded bliss I would have to be convinced that a man would improve my life beyond measure. Charlie was fairly persuasive, then Tommy, but so far I had resisted. I saw no need. Leonardo said that sometimes I thought more like a man than a woman. That was pretty perceptive, but of course I wouldn’t give him satisfaction by admitting it.
Barbara shook her head as though she pitied me, and I understood something about her. She relied on no one but herself, and saw her huge family as a joy and a sign of her independence and ability to make her own way in the world. I admired her, if reluctantly. She took part in and profited by unlawful, even immoral acts, but when the time came to pay the price she accepted it without complaining or feeling sorry for herself. I knew then that I could rely on her completely.
“What about the actual trip through the waters?” I asked. “It has to be dangerous.”
“Well, there’s the Coast Guard, and then the Cuban patrols,” she said casually. “But the Cubans aren’t out there as much as they want you to think—the gas shortage keeps them home a lot of the time.”
Still, I shuddered at the thought. The Cuban military was known to treat Cuban-Americans ruthlessly. I also knew the Coast Guard did a lot of patrols to keep Cuban exile groups from launching attacks on the island from Florida—not to mention looking out for Cuban and Haitian refugee rafters—so they would be out in force. The DEA would also be around, seeking to intercept drug shipments from the Bahamas. And then there would be the legitimate boaters, cruise ships, freighters.
Barbara watched me intently. I could tell she saw my wheels spinning. “Lupe, don’t think so much,” she said. “The more you worry, the more likely your nightmares will come true.”
I didn’t know if she was right, but I had to put it out of my mind. “Then how did Alberto notify the men at Isabela de Sagua that he was coming for a pickup?”
“He sent them a message on that Cuban radio station, Radio Ritmo. He would call and ask them to play ‘Aquellos Ojos Verdes’ at exactly six o’clock the night before we set out. His relatives in Cuba monitored the station, so they knew when to be waiting for us at the cove. Alberto used to say the simplest plans were the best.”
I thought that Alberto had watched one too many D-Day invasion movies, but I didn’t say it. The more I heard about him, the more entrepreneurial and creative he sounded. I hoped he was also cautious.
“We have to do the same thing, then,” I said. “We’ll buy supplies, request the song, and set out at the same time he used to.”
I tried to sound as confident as I could. Our plan was shot if the family contacts in Cuba had heard about Alberto’s death. Actually, there were too many weak points in our plan to start numbering them. It was the only plan we had, and we had to go with it.
I couldn’t even ask Lourdes to pray for us, because I had no intention of letting anyone in my family know what I planned to do. If Fidel Castro didn’t kill me, my father would. In fact, I would rather face Fidel than my father when he was angry.
“And then once we’ve arrived?” I asked hopefully.
“We play it by ear.”
Great.