The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [130]
When Annie returned to the bar, Raffy was there talking to the piano player. He hurried to her when he saw the stainless steel courier case. His large brown eyes widened. “La Reina?”
Annie laughed at his excitement. “My dad is a con man. Since you are also a con man, surely you know that the Queen of the Sea does not exist.”
Raffy’s glowing eyes scanned the gleaming case as she placed it on the bar table. His fingers stretched for the handle.
She slid the case away from him. “Look at yourself! My dad gets everybody all excited about something and then because they’re searching for it, they believe it’s real! It’s a swindle. It’s the big con. It’s like…like a Florida land deal.”
The Cuban smiled, his large dark eyes dreamy. He told her to look out the windows of the Dorado at the glamorous skyscraper skyline of Miami. “What is that out there? It’s a Florida land deal…” He pulled from his pocket a worn dirty folded piece of Xeroxed paper and smoothed it out on top of the metal case. On the paper was a drawing of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and handwritten beneath the figure, “La Reina Coronada del Mar.” Crabbed scribbles in Spanish covered the margins. Raffy translated them for her.
Como la madre de tierra del Inca, Pachamama, ella usó un amplio cabo. Like the Inca earth mother, Pachamama, she wore a broad cape. El cabo era oro. The cape was gold, studded with precious sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and a small quantity of diamonds. Su corona del oro sostuvo siete esmeraldas rectangulares grandes. Her gold crown held seven large rectangular emeralds, each one of them on a gold rod sprayed out like a sun burst. On her breast there was a silver door; inside it, a star ruby. El bebé Jesu sat in the crook of her arm; Christ was silver and had ojos azules del zafiro. Eyes of silver and sapphire.
Raffy returned the frayed drawing reverently to his pocket. He said it was a copy of a page of a letter that the Spanish Hidalgo Don Carlos de Tormes had sent to his wife, a letter in a museum in Seville. It told how Don Carlos would be setting sail from the New World and would bring this statue of the Virgin Mary to the pious Philip II as a token of his gratitude to God (and king) for all the silver and gold he’d dug out of Peruvian land that (for some reason) belonged to Spain.
“But the ship sank. Like so many. A hundred billion dollars lying on the ocean floor.” Raffy’s glittering eyes fixed on the case. “This is true not just because Castro says so. It is absolutely a fact. The Spanish shipped $100 billion in treasure safely over the ocean but another $100 billion sank in sight of my homeland. Excuse me—” Raffy waved to the piano player who was taking a break. “That’s Juan, my cousin on the Ramirez side. Many musicians. He’s the one fixed things up with a guy he knows so this guy just went over for me to the Hyatt in West Palm and explained to Feliz Diaz why I wasn’t there with the statue. He told Diaz how he’d seen two plain-clothes PNR collar me in the Hyatt parking garage and grab the case I was carrying and hustle me into their car. He told Diaz he heard these two guys saying how they’d already picked up Jack Peregrine in South Beach and they were hi-jacking us both back to Havana and it wouldn’t be for a vacation either.” Raffy pointed at his thin chest. “I made that story up myself. Diaz believed it.”
“Let’s hope.” Annie said that Raffy appeared to have a lot of relatives and friends.
“It’s an island,” he said. “Cuba. A beautiful one. Everybody knows their family and neighbors.”
She noted that Sergeant Hart had told her that this so-called sunken treasure, La Reina, belonged to the Cuban people. Why shouldn’t Raffy agree?
Raffy waved expressive fingers at her like an arpeggio. “Even if that s.o.b. Hart says it, it’s a possible point. And better