The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [211]
All at once there was a loud screeching noise of horn and brakes in the street beside the café. People jumped to their feet at the other tables.
Annie saw a two-tone taxi slam to a stop. A small man in bright green trousers flopped across the cab’s fender, rolling over its hood and falling to the crowded cobbled pavement.
An old woman shouted in alarm. Customers ran from their tables at the café and others rushed out of the restaurant, swarming in front of the boxed orange trees near the front row of small tables; all were trying to catch a glimpse of the accident.
In the midst of the hubbub, Annie stood up and saw a slender recognizable hand move smoothly across Ruthie Nickerson’s table-top. She saw two green sparkling objects fall from tanned fingers into Ruthie’s hand. Then the people behind jostled her and she lost sight of her father.
Annie squeezed quickly between the little boxed trees and raced into the plaza. She spotted Dan Hart running out of a low stucco arch toward her. Across the cobbled opening, on the other side, a little apart from the crowd, Jack Peregrine stood, thinner, frailer, in cream silk trousers and Cuban shirt, dappled gold like Ruthie’s brown leather bag that he held up to her in the sunlight. He waved the Fed Ex envelope that Sam had sent to Key West in his other hand. She started running toward him but he grabbed Dan’s arm, thrust the leather bag at him and then slipped through the arch, turned, waved his hand in good-bye, and vanished.
Annie spun around to look back at the café. The small bamboo table was empty. The shopping bag with the Queen in it was gone. The white coffee cup sat there on the café table, coppery lipstick on its rim. Beneath the table the other shopping bag sat beside Ruthie’s chair.
Dan and Annie took the bag back to their hotel room and unwrapped the Queen of Sea. Well, at least a modern copy of that statue, done in gold plate and without jewels in its crown. But modeled—Ruthie had told her—on the real Queen; made right here in Havana by the talented goldsmith, Maria Ramirez, Raffy’s mother.
Chapter 52
The Right Stuff
Rafael Rook hugged his guitar to the dancing alligators on his shirt as the Cessna Amphibian plane moved away from its moorings and bounced across the choppy waves. “Your papa astonishes me,” Raffy called up to Annie in the cockpit. “There he is, dying in Golden Days. Then kazaam he’s stealing Skippings’s car. Then he’s drowned in the bay. Then kazaam here he is today, standing in Plaza de Armas in Havana, Cuba. All of a sudden, I hear Jack’s voice. I turn around and he shoves me forward. ‘Flop that taxi now, Rafael, now, do it!’ And I do it, I don’t think and think and think and worry. I just do it. That’s how we’ll be in paradise. We’ll just do it the way with your dad somehow I could just…do things.”
Dan sat in the plane seat beside the Cuban grifter as they motored away from the harbor rocks to where they would get take-off clearance from a Ramirez relative in the harbormaster’s station. “So,” Dan asked, “Raffy, you little bastard, flopping was Jack’s idea?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, kazaam times two. I’m standing in the Plaza and there he is. ‘Hi, Dan,’ he says. ‘Take care of her,’ he says. And he shoves this damn leather bag here at me. He shows me this FedEx. It’s from Sam, he says, and it’s all the insurance he needs. And poof he’s gone while we’re all watching you rolling around on the hood of an old cab. Willie spots him and gives chase. But you can just imagine who won that race.”
The Cuban nodded. “Jack was the wind. You never know what he’ll do next.” Annie heard that she was cleared for take-off. As she opened the throttle, she yelled at Raffy that he should look to see what was in the bag.