Captain Marco sat with Benito and Antonio under the open shed. A single high floodlight shone down on the boatyard. Five minutes of rain and they could smell the wet ground. Runoff from the roof tapped a line in the dirt.
“You think Felix is working both sides of the street?” Captain Marco said.
Benito shrugged. “Probably. He could have asked me like a man to be silent, paid me an honorable sum—but he had to show me his knife. I think his knife would fit into his asshole, but loosely, with room for his sunglasses.”
“To speak further of holes, this one under the patio goes back all the way under Pablo’s house?” Captain Marco said.
“I don’t know, but it’s deep. The sea dug where the FBI did not. You can hear it sucking, it’s open to the bay underwater at the base of the seawall.”
Big moths flew around a bare bulb above the men. One lit on Antonio’s head. Its feet tickled his forehead until he fanned it away.
Captain Marco poured a short round of rum and squeezed a lime into his glass.
“How long have they got the house?”
“There’s a thirty-day filming permit posted on the gate,” Antonio said. “It was issued to Alexander Smoot of Smoot Productions.”
Benito rubbed a lime on the rim of his glass. The rum was Flor de Caña 18 and the taste of it made him close his eyes for a happy second, tasting it off Lupe’s mouth from moons ago as though she were here in this moment.
When the men saw Cari Mora coming out of the boatyard office, Benito made her a drink like his own and Antonio brought another cane chair to the table. She had the bird on her shoulder. The big cockatoo climbed off onto the top of the chair. She passed it a grape from a bowl on the table.
“Touch it, Mamacita!” the bird said, a reference to an earlier venue in its checkered life.
“Shh,” she said, and gave the bird another grape.
“Cari, you have to stay well clear of that place,” Benito said. “Hans-Peter will sell you, do you know that? He will never believe you are not with us.”
“I know.”
“Does he have any idea where you stay, away from that house?”
“No, and neither does Felix.”
“Do you need a place to stay?” Benito said.
“I have an extra room,” Antonio said quickly.
“I’m okay. I have a place,” she said.
Captain Marco tapped the building plans on the table.
“Cari, do you know what’s going on here?”
“They made some holes in the walls and they’re tearing up the basement looking for something,” she said. “It’s not hard to imagine what it is. Clearly you look for it too.”
“Do you know who we are?”
“Probably. To me you are my friends Señor Benito and Antonio and Captain Marco. That’s all I want to know.”
“You can be in or out,” Captain Marco said.
“I am out, but I want you to win,” Cari said. “Maybe I can tell you what little I know and maybe you don’t tell me secrets I have to keep.”
“What did you see in the house?”
“Hans-Peter Schneider got in a couple of yelling matches on the phone with somebody that he called Jesús. He used a phone card to call Colombia. Mucha lucha. He kept asking, ‘Where is it?’ They swept with metal detectors from the attic down. Lot of rebar in the foundations, they drilled a couple of times. They had a big magnetic drill press, like eighty pounds, and two air hammers.”
“What were you supposed to think with them tearing the place up?”
“Felix said don’t worry, it was his responsibility as rental agent. I said write that down. He said no. The one Schneider flashed some money. To me, quite a lot of money.”
“Did he pay you?”
“Oh, no. He just waved it around and gave me grocery money. I have a new text here from Felix. He says: The boss does not want you some more, but you can come get your money. Or we will send it to your home when you give us the address, or meet you with it at my earliest convenience…. Right, I’ll jump on that.”
“Did anybody see you leaving the house?”
“I don’t think so but I’m not sure. I think they were all in the front.”
“They’ve missed the gun,” Marco said. “Maybe they will see it again.”
“I’ll go now,” Cari said.
Antonio got up quickly. “Wait a little while, Cari, and I’ll take you to wherever you may or may not be staying for all we know.”
“There’s a comfortable seat out on the dock,” Marco said.
Antonio carried her drink out for her and went back to the table.
“Schneider has to be careful now,” Captain Marco said. “The federales see him digging in Miami Beach, they’ll be on him like a man falling out of a tree.”
Marco unrolled some building plans on the table and weighted them down with the bottle and a coconut.
“Pablo’s lawyer filed this plan with the city to get the permit years ago when they built the patio,” the captain said. “See, it’s on concrete piers. That’s why it didn’t collapse when the sea dug it out underneath. You saw the picture Felix took?”
“Just over his shoulder,” Benito said. “He was hugging it to his chicken chest. I have this one. What can you expect from a flip phone?”
“How big was the box you saw?”
The old gardener put his lumpy finger on the building plan. “The box was about here. For scale I only have the skull beside it in this dim picture. The box is bigger than a big refrigerator. Like the big ice machine at Casablanca Fish Market.”
“That big a cave, the hole under the seawall may be big too,” Antonio said.
“Big enough to drag out a big ice machine?” the captain said.
“Nacho Nepri could do it from his barge with the big winch,” Antonio said. “He moves pieces of riprap bigger than that with his winch and crane. If we could get him to do it.”
“We need to see the hole under the seawall. How much water you got there at high tide?” the captain said.
“Along there, eight feet,” Antonio said. “I can look at it underwater from the bay side.”
“You want to go off the crab boat?”
“No, I can get into a place down the street where I do the pool. I’d rather slide along the seawall from there.”
“Tomorrow ebb tide starts half an hour before sunset,” Marco said. “The forecast is clear. Bad glare off the bay into their faces and most likely a raft of grass on the tide. Don’t go in the hole, Antonio. Just slide in there under the grass and take a look. You got air?”
Antonio nodded and rose to leave.
The old gardener lifted a glass to him. “Antonio. Gracias for the ride today.”
“De nada,” Antonio said.
“Though I thought my bill at Yumbo Buffet was excessive for all those people in the truck,” Benito said. “After stuffing their faces, they shamelessly ordered to go, with three gaseosas to wash it down. Antonio … escúchame joven: You will have to watch it now. Bobby Joe will be looking for you.”
“If Bobby Joe’s luck is really bad, he will find me,” Antonio said.
Captain Marco went home to his spare efficiency near the boatyard.
Benito fired up his old pickup and rattled off home. They left a fire in the incinerator, the door open for the firelight.
Lupe was waiting at Benito’s house, in spirit, in the small garden she had made behind Benito’s house. He felt her presence warm and close to him as fire-flies winked over the white blossoms, luminous under the moon. Benito poured a glass of Flor de Caña for himself and one for her. He drank both of them sitting in the garden with Lupe, and being there together was enough.
Cari and Antonio sat on an old car seat on the boatyard dock and looked up at the sky. The bass thump of some distant music came across the water.
“What do you want?” Antonio said. “What would you like to have?”
“I want to live in a place that belongs to me,” Cari said, biting the lime and dropping it back in her drink. “A house where every place you put your hand down is clean. And you can walk around bare-footed and the floor feels good.”
“Live by yourself?”
She shrugged and nodded. “If my cousin had a good place too, and some help with her mom. I want my own house. Close the door and it’s a sweet quiet. Keep it up yourself. You can hear rain on the roof and you know it’s not dripping in on the foot of the bed, it’s running off into the garden.”
“Garden now.”
“Cómo no? I’d like to have some little place to plant stuff. Go out and pick something green and cook it. Steam a snapper in a banana leaf. Play loud music in the kitchen when I want to and maybe have a drink while I’m cooking, dance around in front of the stove.”
“A guy? You want a guy?”
“I want to own the front door. Then maybe I invite somebody in it.”
“Say I showed up on the front steps and knocked. Like, you know, Single Antonio shows up.”
“You gonna be Single Antonio, Antonio? Antonio Soltero Antonio?” The rum felt pretty good.
“No, I’m not going to be Antonio Soltero. Not now. If I do that, somebody’s got to leave the country. I’m not doing that. I got my citizenship serving in the Marines. She can’t get hers that way anymore. She’s got to wait. She’s my friend so I wait with her. Her brother was with me in the service. We lost him.” Antonio tapped the globe and anchor tattoo on his arm. “Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi is a good one. But that’s just one of your tattoos.”
“The Ten Bells? I was a kid. It was a different kind of school. Different set of skills. I don’t have to justify to you.”
“True that.”
“I’ll just say, when I get my business straight, like, to suit you? You will have to burn the front steps out from under me.”
Music from the dark ships up and down the river where televisions glowed. Now Rodrigo Amarante’s strange and beautiful theme from Narcos. More conga than tune reached them across the water.
Antonio had a voice he thought was pretty good. He looked directly at her and sang along.
I am the fire that burns your skin,
I am the water that kills your thirst …
I am the castle tower,
The sword that guards the flowing spring.
For a moment a ship’s horn drowned him out.
You are the air I breathe
And the light of the moon on the sea.
Clouds passed under the moon, painting the moving river in patches of soot and silver. For a moment the river looked easy to wade in.
Sparks flew upward from the fire.
Cari rose and kissed Antonio on the top of his head. He turned his face up to her just too late.
“I need to go home, Antonio Soltero,” she said.