Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [1]
I parked the car and walked past the flagpole that didn’t have a flag that day and up to the door and rang the buzzer and waited. The black Bentley was parked slantwise on the grass, but even though the red Porsche I remembered so well was nowhere in sight, my heart beat harder in anticipation. Waiting there at the door, then ringing again, I felt a sense of trespass, as though I weren’t supposed to be there, like I had gone back on my word in returning here and was in violation of something sacred, something personal, a promise I had made to myself. I half wanted to leave, but when you’re that close, it’s already too late. You’ve already committed yourself, even though you may not know it.
Dominguez, the family’s chauffeur, came out of the four-car garage at that moment and spotted me waiting by the front door. He waved but didn’t come over, which I found odd, because we had been pretty friendly at one time. He had come from Santiago, Cuba, even before the revolution and had worked at every kind of job imaginable before joining up with the Colonel back in the seventies. We used to talk baseball like it was Esperanto, and the only person he had hated more than Castro was George Steinbrenner. In fact, he had a theory the two of them were related. When no one came to the door after a few moments, I walked over to say hello, thinking that maybe he hadn’t really recognized me.
Dominguez had lifted the hood of the Bentley and was staring down at the cleanest engine I’d ever seen outside of a car show. He didn’t look well. His brown eyes had lost their shine and were surrounded by a sickly looking yellow haze, like a pair of beetles floating in pools of spittle. When I had seen him last, he still possessed the stubborn, wiry physique of an old lightweight fighter and at seventy had looked as tough as the bark of an ancient tree. Now he was downright thin except for a slight swelling of the gut beneath his jacket that didn’t match the thinness of his arms and legs. We shook hands, but then he went back to staring down at the engine.
“Cómo estás?” I asked.
“Good.”
“That’s a nice-looking engine,” I said. I could tell he didn’t want to talk to me, but I pressed on anyway, thinking that maybe he was just in an off mood that might break with a joke or two.
“I never thought you come back here anymore,” he said without meeting my eyes.
“Neither did I,” I said. “The Colonel called me.”
Dominguez slammed the hood down and turned to me. He was definitely sick, but there was more than illness in his expression. It was something, I thought, akin to disappointment. He took a white cloth from his back pocket and wiped his hands.
“Nice to see you, Jack.” He turned and walked away toward the garage. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think it had been nice to see me at all.
I have a fairly thick skin about things like that, and snubs don’t cause me much loss of sleep. But there was something off about it just the same, and I wondered if maybe he’d been body-snatched by aliens. I watched him walk away, then went back and rang the doorbell again.
There was a brief flurry of footsteps, and then the maid opened the door and led me wordlessly through the acreage of the living room. The house was as cool as a meat locker, but it would have seemed cold at any temperature. The walls were bone white, and the extra-wide marble tiles looked as though they’d been cut from a slab of glacial ice. There were vases and sculptures and paintings on all the walls, some of it Mexican, most of it Asian. On the wall above the fireplace