Adios Muchachos Read online

  Margarita took Elizabeth’s death like a real professional, rolling with the punches. She nearly went down for the count on the revelation of Elizabeth being a man, but it was Victor’s plan that really threw her for a loop. With all trace of color drained from her face, the grand old lady tottered just a smidgen. She turned her face away from her daughter, perhaps trying to avoid seeing in Alicia’s eyes a confirmation of what she had just heard.

  Alicia saw that her mother needed a moment to get over the shock and went into the kitchen to brew herself a cappuccino.

  “Have you made any decisions yet?” her mother asked from the living room, still not trusting her legs to move from the position in which she was frozen.

  “I’ve only made one decision so far,” Alicia shouted from the kitchen, her face contorted into a mask of bleak determination. And walking into the living room, “I will not go back to the bike; never again will I pedal my ass on the streets of Havana! No way!”

  Alicia could not discern from Margarita’s absentminded nodding whether her mother had given her blessing to her new-found resolve or was just reeling from the shock. She knew beyond any doubt that her mother was a very tough and practical old lady who had weathered more than her share of storms. Whatever the decision, she was convinced that her mother would ultimately support her and council her as much as possible. She always had.

  What she never expected, though, was for her mother’s decision to be so immediate and categorical. “If the family adores him and if Victor is going to be on the inside with all the information about what they’re planning, I don’t think you’ll be in any great danger,” Margarita commented, bypassing the preambles and diving right into the nitty-gritty of the thing.

  Damn, she’s good, Alicia thought. The old bird is not going to try to convince me not to do it; she’s making me convince her that I shouldn’t go through with it.

  “Yes, Mother, I’ve got no problem with that part; it’s Victor who scares me—thief, ex-convict, opportunistic fairy. How can I be sure that he isn’t capable of anything else? What if I help him and then he decides to keep the whole thing for himself?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! That’s what moronic delinquents do in Hollywood movies. Victor is not a moron and this is not a movie.”

  “What if he decides to kill me to eliminate all trails leading to him? After the ransom I’d be worth another two million to him.”

  “And what am I? Painted on the wall? If half a day goes by without me knowing you’re alive and kicking, I call the police and he’s through. He has to know that! He would have to kill us both, and that would be very, very messy.”

  Alicia listened in silence, nodding occasionally.

  “Besides, didn’t you say you had seen the olive skid mark and the position of the body and everything? He’s just not a dumb killer, and that’s that. You would have to be the stupidest person in the world to plan a kidnapping, murder the victim, and then go out to find yourself an accomplice. No, child, I’m certain that Victor may be anything you say, but he is not stupid, and therefore he is not a murderer.”

  “You know, Mother, I think you even like this guy,” Alicia said, relaxing the tension.

  “I would if you hadn’t told me about his thing with his boss,” she said, shuddering. “I guess I can go as far as admitting that if two men or two women like each other, well, what’s to be done? It’s a generational thing, I guess. But this guy has no scruples about screwing whatever comes along, and that just gives me the creeps.”

  Alicia noticed how the wise, calculating old devil had disappeared to make way for her delightful, insufferable mother again.

  “You don’t have to make that face, you know. He wasn’t screwing a leper. He really admired and respected Rieks.”

  “Don’t make it worse.”

  “Mother, everyone has the right to choose his or her own life style.”

  “Yes dear, to each according to his needs and from each according to the quantity and quality of his instruments.”

  Alicia laughed with genuine mirth. “Let it go, Mother. You never did understand anything about Marxism.”

  Margarita’s immediate acceptance of the situation, and her cool analysis that coincided so perfectly with her own thoughts, amounted to the decisive little tweak Alicia needed to take the bit in her teeth and go for it. Driving back to Siboney, she recalled with great tenderness and gratitude how her mother had always been there for her. God, but she had guts! When her family left her alone in the country and moved to Miami; when she found out about her cheating husband; when the sonovabitch left her. If Victor got out of line, she would bite off his balls and spit them in his face. If worse came to worst, her mother was all the backup she would need. And right there, tears welling up in her eyes, she vowed that whatever happened, she would never leave her mother.

  OK, sweetheart, that’s enough. We’ve got to get out there and earn that five million … and live to enjoy it. The opportunity was there; the only thing they had to do was play it out right. It would be stupid to let this moment pass.

  There were two overriding considerations: number one, she too would rather kill herself than slide back into a senseless life with only the dimmest prospects; number two, the world was not made for cowards. It was like her Spanish grandfather used to say, “If you want to catch fish, you have to get wet.”

  On her return to the house in Siboney she found an anxious Victor standing in the open doorway with dark rings under his eyes. His appreciation of his own aplomb had been way off the mark, and he had not been able to sleep at all.

  “So what is it going to be?” he asked, with something of the man-child in his voice.

  Alicia walked into the house and stood in the middle of the room. Her adrenaline was running out and she was beginning to feel the wear and tear of the night’s pressure. Victor flopped onto the couch facing her and waited for her reply.

  “Well?”

  She lit a cigarette, dropped her purse on the center table, and stared at him. “I have no way of knowing if that guy had an accident or if you killed him and nailed his head on the spike.”

  Victor attempted to get up off the couch. “How can you even think that I …”

  Alicia, now in complete control of the situation, pushed him gently back down on the couch and continued: “It’s my turn to talk, goddamnit. You listen and don’t interrupt.” She paused, and now it was Victor who lit a cigarette to stop his nerves from giving out on him. “You listen to me. I don’t know who the fuck you are, Victor. I don’t even know if that’s really your name. What I do know is that you’ve been lying to me and using me from the moment I met you. First you convinced me that you were interested in me and even led me to believe that we might have something together. Then I find out you’re a class A peeping Tom and all you wanted to do was to recruit me to put on shows for you and your precious Elizabeth. All of a sudden it turns out that you’re an ex-delinquent and an ex-con, that Elizabeth was a man, and that after fucking your boss for three years, you want me to help you fuck the rest of his family out of four million dollars with this cockamamie plan to kidnap a corpse. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

  Alicia paused again, took a few steps toward the window, and turned to face him. “And about your plan; I’m certain you’re hiding something from me …”

  “You don’t have any right—”

  “I have the right … and the left … and the long one in between, and if you value them you’ll shut the fuck up and listen!” Alicia screamed.

  Victor opened his mouth to protest, but finally accepted the reality of his situation and shrugged his shoulders in resignation. Alicia took a long drag to stave off the encroaching hysterics and blew the smoke out through pursed lips, imitating the stack on a locomotive. Having already lashed out at him and voiced all of her recriminations, she could now get on with the business at hand.

  “However,” she continued, “my instinct tells me you’re no murderer, and it’s obvious
you need my help to pull this off. That, plus the fact that I refuse to go back to that screwed up life with no prospects, adds up to: I’m up against the wall and I have to take my chances with you. But just remember: I’m going to work with you, but I don’t trust you. I’ve already made arrangements to cover my ass; so don’t fuck with me.”

  “I never expected less and I’m delighted. I don’t trust people who trust too easily. It makes me think that either they’re very dumb, and therefore unreliable, or they’ve figured out a way to screw me. And that I really hate. The only hard fact here is that neither of us have any other way out of this bullshit life we have. So let’s get down to the rest of the details of the plan.”

  “Not now,” Alicia protested. “Don’t explain anything until you tell me what we have to do to get rid of that body. Having him lying around the house is getting on my nerves.”

  “Precisely,” Victor parried, “that’s exactly what we have to do first, but we need certain tools and equipment.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve got the list right here,” Victor explained, taking a seat in front of the laptop he had set up on an end table.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Six

  RIGHT NOW

  Jack Dark glasses

  Measuring tape Dollar bills

  Rubber gloves Surgical tape

  Turkish towels Medicines

  Tarpaulin Potable liquid

  Alcohol Needles and thread

  Baggy jeans Bandana

  Scissors Wide dress

  Electrical power cord Bobby pins

  Pliers Sandals

  Wig Belt (A’s purse)

  DON’T FORGET

  Ring Mask

  Prints Formatted diskette

  Burn printout Lose Victor’s watch

  Burn clothes Erase hidden text (A)

  Rake ashes Maid, Gardener, Freezer

  NEXT DAY’S ACTIONS

  Pick a hotel (V) functioning window (A)

  Find or make a drop for text Draft messages for satchel,

  No.3 close to chosen hotel (V) bib. And drop (V)

  Reserve adequate room with Practice disfiguring voice (A)

  MATERIALS

  Adequate valise (A) Tube to use as support (A)

  Carbon paper (A) Adhesive stick (A)

  Thick felt marker (A) Special hook (A)

  Tube of red paint (A) Field glasses (V)

  Large valise (A) Bathing sponges (farm) (A)

  Chain (A) Block and pulley (farm) (V)

  Screwdriver and screws (V) Roll of hemp rope (farm) (V)

  Deep-sea fishing gear (A) Thick nylon rope (farm) (V)

  Between 10:20 and 11:30, they wrote out the annotated script of what they intended to get done that day, plus a provisional outline (to be adjusted along the way) of the actions to be carried out during the next few days. As soon as they had agreed on the preliminary steps, they kept nothing but the list of props. They worked meticulously, like screenwriters, and like any mystery writer worth their salt, they began at the end. The most important thing about this script was that it had to have a happy ending.

  The freezer in the house with the pond was mounted on a steel frame with casters on all four corners. Alicia brought the jack from the car, but she could not get it under the freezer frame. Then Victor brought his, a German hydraulic jack with a forward flange. It fit! The first goal on the agenda was met.

  Next came measuring the freezer. In the utility room behind the garage they found an old yardstick that would do just fine. The freezer measured fifty-six inches by twenty-eight inches, and the height was thirty-six inches on the outside. They would have to empty it to measure the internal height, but Victor calculated that it should be around thirty inches.

  When they finished measuring, they rolled the freezer into the opposite corner of the kitchen so that it would not be visible from the living room when the kitchen door was open.

  Hurrying back to the other house, Victor started to measure the body while Alicia took notes. “OK, five feet, seven inches long; seventeen inches from the back of the knee to the heel. How’s that?”

  “Perfect.”

  Alicia made a check mark on her list.

  “What’s next on the script?” Victor asked.

  Alicia looked at the list. “Now we put on the rubber gloves.”

  “Fine. Action!” Victor shouted to an imaginary camera.

  “Take one,” said Alicia, picking up the role of scriptgirl.

  The accomplices were trying to lighten up their sordid business with a little bit of black humor. They exchanged their first real smiles in many, many hours. Alicia kissed him on the neck as he caressed her butt. Handling the corpse stirred a desire in them to embrace, to feel the warmth of life, of flowing blood, of throbbing bodies.

  Alicia searched in the kitchen and came up with several pairs of rubber gloves. She slipped her hands into a pair and, seeing Victor doing everything wrong, helped him put on his gloves.

  Victor walked out to the utility room, entered with a shove on the door, and came back out with the big red wheelbarrow used by the gardener to cart away dry leaves. He drove it into a room where they wrapped the body in Turkish towels (dress, wig, make-up and all) and loaded it into the wheelbarrow.

  Out in the yard again, Victor and Alicia took a close look at the world around them. They already knew no one could see them, unless someone were to climb one of the royal palms along the highway—and then they would still have to use field glasses to make something out in any kind of detail. There was a three-story building about two hundred yards away, but nothing would be visible from there; Rieks himself had cut off the view of the two houses a year earlier by having his contractors put up a squash court with twenty-five-foot walls on all three sides.

  No, no one could see them.

  “But just in case they’re watching from a Russian satellite,” Victor had jested when they were planning the transfer of the body, “we’ll have him neatly wrapped up in Turkish towels.”

  Joking aside, Victor was glad to have the body covered. He found looking at Rieks, with his garish make-up, too repulsive. He kept repeating to himself that he was not responsible for Rieks’s death, but since they had begun to manhandle him like just so much meat, he had begun to feel a little dirty. Time and again he told himself that he could not back out now, that he had nothing to do with the death, and that he was not a miserable carrion-eater. He persuaded himself that he was simply picking up the baton that destiny had put into his hands … and he could not but admire Alicia’s cold blood.

  Before moving the body into the adjoining house, Victor stopped at the barbeque pit and pulled down a tarp that was used to provide shade for whomever was working the grill. It smelled of smoke, but otherwise it was clean. He then went into the utility room and came out with a fifty-pound bag of charcoal and a can of starter fluid. Alicia, picking up the cue like a trooper, was already raking leaves and dry twigs into the pit to get the fire going.

  If Victor had been a boy scout, he might have done things differently; as it was, he poured about half the can of starter fluid onto the heap of tinder and charcoal. The first flash gave them a moment of panic, but after the flame quickly burned itself down to about a yard high, they headed for the house.

  They wheeled the body into the living room, where Alicia spread the towels on the floor. Victor lifted the wheelbarrow and Alicia pulled Rieks by the ankles onto the towels with visible care not to bump him too hard.

  Standing by the freezer—waiting to be reorganized on top of Rieks so that anyone accidentally opening the freezer would not see the little deed—was a gourmet’s dream: a two-pound jar of caviar (partially eaten), five trays of prime cuts, a dozen lobster tails, several pounds of shrimp, boxes of regular and rock oysters, various types of wurst, two large red snappers, and several salmon filets.

  “The watch!” Victor exclaimed, rushing out of the kitchen.

  Victor returned barefoot and in his un
derwear, his hair dripping water. He was winding a large alarm clock. “You’ve got to take all this stuff home with you today.” He spun the hands to set the time.

  “What were you doing?”

  Still manipulating the clock at the height of his bellybutton: “We’ve got to remember to tell the servant to take her vacation as of tomorrow.”

  Suddenly, he felt a light hand with an emerald ring stealing avidly into his briefs. Alicia was behind him now, bringing his unsuspecting penis to life and nibbling his ribs and love handles.

  “God, this is strange; I get exited every time I remember that you like men.”

  “Only sometimes, and not very often,” Victor protested between gasps. He removed her blouse and bra like a surgeon and began fondling her breasts. He took her by the waist and lifted her to let her slide slowly along his body as he licked and sucked from the mons veneris, across her stomach, up through the cleft between her breasts, contracting his muscles, beating a tattoo with his penis on her bursting clitoris.

  “Come!”

  Victor began to sink onto the floor; Alicia pushed him the rest of the way down and mounted him violently.

  “You bastard! You bugger!” Alicia cried in paroxysms of rage and ecstasy. “Why do I have to like rat-prick bastards like you? Why the hell can’t I fall for a normal, decent guy?”

  After a short pause, they took the dress and the wig off of the body. With the body naked now, the smell of Elizabeth’s perfume became pervasive. Alicia felt a tinge of envy at the very expensive perfume that stayed so long it was hard to get off, even with a brush and yellow soap. Rieks was a lot heavier than they had imagined, and the first two attempts to get him into the freezer failed miserably, since neither of them wanted to really embrace the body too closely. Finally, Victor came up with an alternative.

  “Get me a piece of rope, will you?”