The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [205]
Dan rubbed his hands violently through his curls. “Damn, I wish I had that picture now!”
“I’ve got it.” She found the old tattered photo in her purse that she’d palmed from her dad. Together they examined it in the strong sunlight but it was hard to see details. Annie said, “We need the original. On the piano at Pilgrim’s Rest. It’s much bigger and clearer.” She would have called Sam but they’d been emphatically instructed not to make, or try to make, any phone calls from Cuba.
They studied the picture: The small birthday cake on the banquette table. Annie in her velvet dress and cowboy boots, leaning happily against her father. Jack, his perfect suit and slender tie, with his deep-tanned smiling face and his trim fair mustache, with his arms stretched out, and a cigarette in his tanned fingers. Behind them, other diners filled in the background, laughing women, other men in thin ties and perfect suits. Among them were five men seated together, smoking, smiling. They were too small to distinguish. It was these men that made the photo matter so much.
Annie and Dan found a shop in the Plaza where there was a copier. They enlarged the picture as much as possible. Dan identified two of the diners (call them A and B, he said) as two very famous men who had been notoriously prosecuted later for political bribery and racketeering. A was still in prison and B had mysteriously died in a plane crash shortly before a congressional hearing at which he’d agreed to testify. The third man was Archbishop de Uloa. Next to him was Feliz Diaz. Both were recognizable, although the photograph had been taken almost twenty years ago and their hair was black, not gray.
The fifth man would be recognizable to almost anybody. And, as Dan said, anyone with a memory (unfortunately in America, that included few citizens and almost none of the press) would remember that this powerful public figure had consistently claimed, even under oath, that he had never met A or B in his life.
Annie and Dan plotted what they would do. An hour passed. Raffy didn’t return. They went back to their hotel room. In their absence the room had been—according to Dan—“tossed by pros,” ransacked carefully but perceptibly and then restored to order. Whether the break-in had been carried out by the Havana police or by American undercover agents or by associates of Feliz Diaz, it was impossible to guess. Maybe the infiltrators had been looking for the Queen of the Sea, maybe for clues to Jack Peregrine’s whereabouts, maybe just conducting a routine search. Dan and Annie carefully checked their belongings but nothing seemed to be missing.
Another half-hour passed with no sign of Raffy. They walked to Ramirez Gold and Silver, a once handsome if now dilapidated shop with walls blue as the sea and doors and windows of iron filigree. In the main window were displayed a gold chain and a silver bowl with tongs. The shop was closed.
They strolled around the Plaza de Armas, looking for Raffy. They returned to the café on the side street where they’d eaten lunch. Now a young hard-muscled man in black jeans and a black T-shirt with a portrait of the rock band KISS was sitting at a table. He was the man whose photograph Fierson had shown them at the Sigsbee meeting.
“Fred Owen,” Annie said.
Dan was amused. “Feds. We’re supposed to think he’s from Moscow or what?”
Noisily the old pink coupe de ville bounced to a stop near the café. Oswardo rolled down his window and told Dan in Spanish that Raffy had been detained but that they should go as scheduled to the bank, where everything was arranged.
“Is Raffy okay?” Annie called to Oswardo but he had rolled up the window and the old Cadillac was jouncing away over the cobbled bricks.
A nearby church bell rang the hour. Dan stood up. “Let’s go, Sundance.”
Annie smiled tensely; she wasn’t sure she liked the analogy.
Like much of Old Havana, too poor to be ruined in the ’70s and ’80s, the branch bank was beautiful, unrenovated, with a floor of old soft-edged cream