The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [45]
“You’re in Miami?” Annie set down the plate of sashimi. “Is my dad in St. Louis?”
But the bizarre Latino caller could not be deterred from his philosophizing. “What does Jack’s fate tell you about the human race?—”
She interrupted. “Mr. Rook, if you and my father are such close friends, tell me something he’s said to you about my mother. Does she live there in Miami with him?”
He was clearly taken aback. “Your mother? Jack’s a bachelor.”
Sam kept plucking at Annie’s sleeve, whispering, “Jack could be making it up. He could do handwritings, voices, anything.”
But whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t her father. Even after all these years apart, Annie was sure she would recognize her father’s bright metallic voice. Rook’s timbre rustled like leaves blown across a yard. “You’re sure you’re a close friend?”
He puffed dismay. “Close? What could be closer than lying side by side in a prison cell in son-of-a-bitch Cuba?”
His response wasn’t the one she’d expected. “Cuba? My dad was in prison in Cuba? When?”
Rook said, “To me it feels like yesterday. One year, twelve long months, in that cell. Jack gave me the will to survive. Otherwise? I would have slit my throat on a rusty can lid, if I’d had a can, which I didn’t. I would have woven a noose of my own rotted trouser legs. They took away even time. No watches. But the worst was a bastard threw my guitar to the floor and just slowly stepped on it for the cruel pleasure.”
She asked if he were a musician.
“Ah…Here’s a question: Is what we are, what we might have been? Or is what we are, what with such sorrow, we have become?” He paused as if expecting her to offer an answer. When she didn’t, he added, “‘I have a reasonable good ear in music.’ To my mother’s grief I chased rumba down many excessively scummy streets. I could tell you—”
“Don’t. Mr. Rook! Mr. Rook—”
“In Miami my cousin found me a job with a dance band. Sad to say, many years later I returned to Havana, with your papa, and that’s when the bastards got us.” Over Annie’s attempts to interrupt, Rafael described how, for twelve months in a small slimy lightless cell, her father had recited Shakespeare from memory every night until dawn. “Oh, the poems and songs. He could just pull out a little verse every night from his head and it would be enough to keep me from misery. Compared to him, that Spider Woman Kiss, that was just silly movies. But this was Shakespeare. Thing of beauty, your papa. I can never repay him…What a heartbreak. And yet death comes to us all if we’re mortal, which they say historically we are—”
Annie took advantage of the young man’s necessary intake of breath. “Just stop there, okay! If my dad’s dying, why did he leave Miami and rush off to St. Louis?”
That sudden decision, Rook confessed, remained a mystery. In fact, Jack had left Golden Days entirely against Rook’s advice.
“What about his doctors? Isn’t Golden Days a hospital?” Annie paced, yanking the phone cord free of the leaping Malpy.
“Golden Days? It’s a petty creep down a dusty hall. I had a connection there and we slipped him in but I would not recommend it. Now he very much needs you to meet him in St. Louis with the King of the Sky. There are people who…do not wish him well.”
Annie didn’t doubt it. “What does Dad want, the big emerald?”
“Big emerald?” The Cuban sounded greedy. “You found a big emerald?”
“Or the password in his jacket? Do you know what this password’s to?”
A little too eagerly, he asked her to tell him what the password was.
She declined to do so. “Rook, what the hell are you and my father up to? Why does he need a plane? Can he even fly a plane? Frankly, I never thought he could.”
Rook claimed that Jack could do anything. Conversely, Jack and he were up to nothing. “I would basically like to offer him a helping hand at this juncture, because of my great debt to him; that’s the simple truth, Annie, no