Adios Muchachos Read online

  “I’m sorry, but since I’m leaving for Varadero tonight and Mr. King will be on a business trip, he lent the house to some Italian friends who want complete privacy. And don’t worry about the holidays,” Alicia continued. “I’m certain that Mr. King will give you time off during the holidays.”

  “Oh, thank you,” the woman repeated, not knowing whether to be happy or worried.

  “Now, please leave the house in perfect order because these guests are very important business associates.”

  “Yes ma’am. If there’s anything out of place when you come back, it won’t be my doing.”

  Well, the maid thought, I guess I told her. Lots of privacy and no staff can only mean one thing … orgies. And it’ll take me a week to get the place in order.

  Chapter

  Thirty

  November 8, 1800 hours

  Jan van Dongen put Karl Bos’s overnight bag into the back seat of Victor’s red Malibu and stepped into the car to wait for Bos to tip the redcap and get in. He asked Victor to race the engine a bit and turn the air conditioner up full blast with all the ducts blowing into the back seat. The guy who said “ice cold air” must have had a very personal definition of the term, he thought, wiping profuse perspiration from his brow.

  A moment later, Karl Bos got into the car, sweating copiously and, strangely, sharing the same thought van Dongen had just had. After his quick visit to Amsterdam—the beautiful, chilly, rainy, foggy Amsterdam he loved—he was glad to see the endless dome of blue skies, but the heat was murder when you were not at the beach.

  Somewhere ahead of them, cars were honking. Traffic was jammed and tempers were hotter than the atmosphere. Tourist busses, taxies, and hoards of people who had come to see someone off or receive friends and relatives. Tearful good-byes, joyous hellos, straw hats, shorts, T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara, a quick slug of rum out of a bottle in a paper bag, kids with sodas and hot dogs …

  Cubans are an amazing lot, Bos thought. Whenever anyone travels abroad or returns, their whole family, half their friends, and a quarter of the neighborhood turns out at the airport.

  Victor finally pulled free of the airport traffic jam and turned to get on the brand-new expressway built to ferry tourists into Havana.

  “How was your trip?” van Dongen asked.

  “The family will pay with no questions asked,” Bos commented, answering van Dongen’s real, unspoken question.

  “What about Rieks’s wife?” Victor asked, “What does she think?”

  “She agreed. The whole family agrees, difficult as that may seem. The old lady was particularly forceful in insisting that under no circumstances were the police to be brought in, nor were we to do anything that might endanger Rieks. She, Vincent, and the family lawyer repeated several times that we were to accept the kidnappers’ conditions and pay whatever they asked.”

  “I think we should ask them for a picture of Rieks holding the day’s newspaper. We have to make certain that he’s still alive.”

  “No, Jan,” Bos replied sternly, “the Grootes have forbidden that. The money is really of no consequence to them. If anything were to happen to Rieks, his wife would get ten million from the insurance company, so this is not about money. The important thing is not to alarm the kidnappers. We want them to behave in a businesslike manner and not harm Rieks.”

  “But asking for a picture is standard operating procedure. Any kidnapper knows that. And if they refuse, we do as they as ask and forget about it. But if they do send the picture, we’ll all be able to go through the rest of the motions with a lot more hope.”

  Karl Bos pushed out his lower lip and looked up into the car’s gray ceiling. He was trying to think the idea through and finally come to a conclusion. He looked at his watch and asked Victor for his cell phone. A moment later, Bos was talking to his wife in Dutch, which she did not really understand—but since his Papiamento was even worse, they got along in Dutch. Next he talked to his secretary, this time in English, and asked her to set up a meeting with the Cuban engineers for the following morning.

  Ten minutes later, the red car pulled up to a sprawling, one-story house in the Fontanar suburb of Havana. Bos’s wife was standing outside to welcome him as if he had been gone for a whole month.

  “OK gentlemen, thank you very much. We meet in my office in two hours. Jan, make sure all the employees have left the building.”

  November 8, 2100 hours

  The meeting was attended by Karl Bos, Jan van Dongen, and Victor King—no secretaries, no assistants. The first point of order was to decide who would be the contact person with the kidnappers. Victor was quick to beg off. He alleged that he was still too depressed from what had happened. In fact, it had been just five days since he had managed to survive the attack. His forehead and wrists still bore the signs of his encounter. He was pale and he had lost weight.

  Van Dongen volunteered and Karl Bos agreed.

  Victor asked how they were going to solve the problem of the cash. That kind of money could invite a serious problem. At Bos’s suggestion, Vincent Groote had ordered Geert de Greiff, Managing Director of the Caracas office, to send the four million to Havana by messenger. De Greiff had promised to have the money in Havana by November 15.

  Van Dongen again brought up the matter of asking the kidnappers for a photograph of Rieks with the day’s newspaper in his hands. Victor vehemently supported the idea and Bos wound up agreeing: “OK, it’s not a bad idea. If I can get the family to agree, we’ll go with it.”

  Chapter

  Thirty-One

  November 8, 2300 hours

  “What? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Alicia screamed when she heard that they wanted a picture and that Victor had supported the idea.

  “What are we going to send them, a picture of the body, all stiff and made up like a black woman?”

  “Take it easy, Alicia,” Victor urged. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Alicia glared at Victor with a mix of rage and uncertainty.

  “Tomorrow, when you phone Bos and he proposes taking the picture, you tell him that you have to talk it over with your partners. And don’t forget to ask who is going to deliver the money. He’ll tell you it’s van Dongen.”

  Alicia scribbled more notes on her pad and made another gesture of disgust. “I don’t understand why you didn’t volunteer. Everything would have been easier if you were the one to take the money and just drop it off wherever we please.”

  “Nothing doing! I don’t want anyone in the company to see me even look at that money.”

  Victor stepped up to the freezer and tried to open it. “Did you lock this?”

  “Maid.”

  “Right! Give me the key.” Victor opened the freezer and began to rummage through the upper layer of food packages. “I don’t want to be associated with the money because I’m the only witness to the kidnapping and that’s enough for some skeptical bastards to start suspecting me.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of anything! Don’t you know how those bastards think? The closest person to the crime, even the person who reports it, is their first suspect. Besides, van Dongen is a cousin, a member of the family. He’s beyond reproach.”

  Alicia was intrigued by Victor’s rummaging. “What are you doing in there? Leave the poor bastard alone!”

  “We’ve got to defrost him, don’t we?”

  Alicia stared at him, wondering what he was talking about.

  “For the picture … we have to defrost him …”

  “How are we—”

  “We just put him out by the pool, like any normal person getting a tan, and …”

  “Are you crazy? He’ll stink to high heaven. Every vulture in Cuba will be circling the house, and we’ll have the police in here in no time thinking we’re selling hot meat.”

  “Well, it’s actually cold …”

  “Spare me the jokes for now, please. Don’t you know that illegal slaughter of cattle and all that kind of stuff
can get you about fifteen years?”

  Alicia was on the verge of tears. Victor took her in his arms to comfort her. “Don’t get hysterical. As soon as he’s flexible, we set him up on a deck chair, take the picture, and, wham, back in the freezer.”

  “Well, OK, but you do it. I don’t want to touch him,” she said with a shudder.

  November 9, 0200 hours

  An ass and a pair of legs about to lose contact with the floor—that was all you could see of Victor as he fished the last couple of lobsters out of the enormous freezer for Alicia to add to the pile of dripping packages stacked on the stainless steel sink counter.

  “This is the last of it,” Victor exclaimed triumphantly, looking at Alicia and trying to warm his half-frozen hands in his armpits.

  Alicia approached the freezer and sneaked a peek at Groote in his prayerful position of pious prostration. Coming up beside her, Victor reached in to try to move the body. Failing in his first attempt, he gave it a stronger shove and failed again.

  “Sonovabitch!!!”

  “What’s wrong?” Alicia asked.

  “The sonovabitch is frozen to the bottom … but it’s my own fucking fault … I should’ve known this would happen … It always happens.”

  “OK, OK,” Alicia soothed, taking command of the crisis situation, “all we have to do is pour warm water on the parts where he’s stuck and thaw him loose. We have to thaw him anyway, don’t we?”

  Glad to let her take over, Victor stood back, moved over to the espresso maker, filled it, and waited for the … What was it the slaves in Cuba used to call it? ‘The black nectar of the white gods’? Well, the black and white crap is pretty much passé now, but this is certainly the nectar of …

  “Hey,” Alicia called, breaking Victor’s magic moment, “if I have to do everything by myself, I’m going to have to get seventy-five percent of the take. Here, use your mucho macho muscles to lift this pot out of the sink and put it on the stove.”

  Victor turned to Alicia with a boyish, “what’d I do?” look of wounded innocence.

  “It’s bad enough that this damn halogen crap is going to take all day now, but if you turn off on me, then we’re the ones in hot water,” she harangued.

  With the pot issue safely in hand, Victor turned to the steps they had mapped out for the next few hours: “Have you calculated the weight of the money?”

  “Not yet, but I brought over my mother’s spice scale and we can do it now.”

  “Spice scale?” Victor asked, as they moved into the living room to give the stove time to heat the water.

  “Yes. For a while there, my father was trying to duplicate certain sauces and dressings he had tasted in Indonesia, and the proportions were almost in goddamn nanograms,” she explained. “What I don’t have is a hundred-dollar bill.”

  “We don’t need one,” Victor said. “They all weigh the same.”

  Alicia took a small chest from one of the end tables and opened the top, revealing a minute analytical balance with tiny slivers of metal that served as weights.

  “OK, give me all the bills you have so we can get some kind of critical mass here,” Victor said.

  “My father warned me once that you have to use tweezers to handle the weights,” she warned.

  “Screw the tweezers,” Victor protested, but wound up having to use them anyways because his fingers were too clumsy for the tiny slivers.

  “So, ten bills weigh just about ten grams. That means a gram each. Great! The four million in hundreds is going to need 40,000 bills for the whole package to weigh forty kilograms, which means the valise with the money is going to weigh around eighty-eight pounds.”

  “Eighty-eight pounds!” Alicia muttered with a worried look. “How am I supposed to lift that?”

  “No problemo! With the gear I’m going to get, you could lift an elephant.”

  Chapter

  Thirty-Two

  November 9, 0800 hours

  Karl Bos was in his office signing documents and handing them absentmindedly to an assistant, who slipped them, one by one, into a transparent folder. When the last one was put away: “Ms. Castillo, if there’s anything that urgently requires my personal attention, I’ll be in the conference room with Mr. King and Mr. van Dongen; otherwise, I am not to be disturbed.”

  The oval table was littered with pads, ballpoints, telephones, water bottles, coffee cups. The three men sat there, trying to dispel the tension. Victor smoked, van Dongen stared at the ceiling, and Karl Bos poked at his palm computer and made notes in silence. Just as Bos was looking at his wristwatch for the hundredth time, the telephone rang.

  “Yes!”

  A second later, he arched his eyebrows and nodded to the others to let them know that it was the call they had been waiting for. He made the shape of a woman in the air and shaped his lips to form the word “woman.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  Dressed like a chubby American tourist, with the corresponding wig and sandals, Alicia exaggerated a Mid-western accent and pinched her nose to distort her voice. “Will you be prepared to make the payment on the seventeenth?”

  “Yes, the money will be ready.”

  “Who will be making the payment? Remember, it must be someone we know.”

  “Yes, of course. The payment will be made by our Mr. van Dongen.”

  “Ah, good. The nose with the man attached.” In spite of himself, Karl Bos sneaked a peek at Jan van Dongen as the caller continued: “Please remember that you are to prepare four hundred packs containing one hundred bills each.”

  “Yes.”

  “No consecutive serial numbers.”

  “Understood.”

  “That will come to about one hundred pounds; so calculate the volume and get the right size bag.”

  “Yes, that will be fine, but we will need to see a picture of Mr. Groote holding today’s or tomorrow’s newspaper.”

  “A photo? That should be no problem, but I’ll have to consult with my associates.”

  The line went dead.

  “I think they’re going to accept the part about the picture,” Bos said, making the thumbs up sign to Jan. “It was a good idea, Jan.”

  Van Dongen smiled, satisfied.

  “Well,” Bos stood and recovered the cigarette holder he had left in the ashtray when the phone rang, “the ball is in our court, for now; so let’s get moving. They want the money in four hundred packages of hundred-dollar bills, and it has to be ready by the seventeenth.”

  Fiddling with a ruler and a ten-dollar bill he had just retrieved from his wallet, van Dongen calculated, mumbled, scribbled, mumbled again, and announced: “We’ll be needing a volume of about a seventh of a cubic meter.”

  “What’s that in measurements,” Victor asked, “so I can go out and buy it?”

  “We’re going to have to get a strong man to tote a hundred pounds around,” commented Bos.

  “Yeah, I have some weights at home, Jan, if you think you’ll need them,” Victor joked.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Three

  November 9,1200 hours

  A man with long black hair and a thick moustache was presenting his receipt at the Foto Centro shop on Twenty-third Street. The girl gave him an envelope; he paid and walked out into the noonday sun. It was a scorcher.

  November 9, 1300 hours

  The clerk at the Triton Hotel looked up at the man who had given him the passport to verify that it was the same Spanish-looking gentleman in the picture.

  “Welcome to our hotel, Señor Groote; we wish you a pleasant stay with us.”

  Walking out of the hotel with the keys that would be used on the following day, the dark Groote-persona got into the waiting car and it took off. Turning onto Fifth Avenue on the way back to the house, the man removed the wig and moustache, stuffed them into a briefcase, and proceeded to wipe the grease paint off his face.

  “That was a masterpiece of acting and disguise,” Alicia commented, looking through the pictures. “I alm
ost didn’t let you back in the car.”

  “Yes, it did work rather well,” Victor said, smiling.

  Chapter

  Thirty-Four

  November 9, 1500 hours

  Alicia and Victor had almost succeeded in defrosting Rieks. Stretched out on a deck chair by the pool, Groote was wearing the straw hat that people in the country used to protect themselves from the implacable rays of the sun. Victor approached the body and poked it in several places to see how far the thawing had gone—it would not do to break off a piece.

  About ten minutes later, Alicia came out of the house carrying a large pail of steaming water. “Well, do we start to wash him, or what?”

  Victor nodded and Alicia began scrubbing Rieks with a large bath sponge and detergent to get all the dark make-up off of the parts of the body that would appear in the picture.

  “Watch out you don’t rip any of the skin off of his face—” Victor started.

  “OK, that’s it! Who died and made you boss?” Then, looking at Rieks: “Never mind the joke! Just get over here and give me a hand with the washing.” She cut off her invective to ask, “And why would the skin come off?”

  “They say that when a person is frozen you can break pieces off them because they get so brittle, and the same goes for the skin. I mean, that’s what they say up in the friggin’ Yukon.”

  “Isn’t he thawed out?” Alicia asked.

  “Not entirely … and it’s better that way because otherwise he would be all floppy and impossible to manage.”

  “All right, let’s see if we can do this before he starts stinking.”

  “I don’t think—” Victor began.

  “Don’t think. And don’t talk to me,” Alicia interrupted. “Yuk! In a few minutes he’s going to stink, and that’s that.”

  When they got through with the bath, Victor took Rieks by the armpits, Alicia grabbed him by the ankles, and together they somehow managed to load him into the funereal wheelbarrow. Victor turned his back on the wheelbarrow and pulled it rickshaw-fashion to avoid seeing Rieks any more than he had to. As Victor pulled the wheelbarrow into the house, Rieks’s head fell out over the end and began to bob. Alicia, who was following close behind, made the rest of the walk into the house bending over to hold up Rieks’s head. She was relieved that Victor couldn’t see her because she would have been hard-pressed to explain what she was doing.