She opened her small duffel bag, checked its contents for the umpteenth time, and pulled out the clothes she would wear for the flight and the boat entry into Cuba: a heavy T-shirt, a pair of dark hiking slacks that could unzip into shorts, and some canvas hiking shoes. She repacked that day’s clothes and closed the duffel. She dressed in the next day’s clothes and went back downstairs to the kitchen. She found the men in conversation at a large kitchen table.
Paul Guarneri was talking American football to Anastacio, who changed the subject when Alex came into the room. He informed her that the plane was fueled up and ready to go. “It’s down at the end of the dock,” Anastacio said. “Did you see it?”
“I did,” Alex said. “Cessna of some sort, right?”
“Cessna Caravan,” he said. “1986. Fine plane.”
Alex nodded. “I think Jimmy Buffett used to fly one of those,” she said. “He tipped one over on Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts several years ago.”
“Did it sink?” Anastacio asked.
“Not that I remember.”
“That’s what I mean. Fine plane.”
She laughed. The tension eased a little.
“Sit down, Alex,” Paul said. “Relax and join us.”
He gave her hand a squeeze, let it go, and pulled out a chair for her. She sat and slid into the place at the table next to Paul. There were sandwiches. Alex grabbed half of one and a water.
“You like Jimmy Buffett?” Anastacio asked her.
“Seriously, yes. He’s great. I’ve seen him in concert twice.”
“He plays Miami a lot,” Anastacio said. “My daughters love him. Me?” he made a equivocating gesture with his heavy palm. “I guess he sings better than he flies. That reminds me. Your pilot will arrive here at 3:00 a.m. His name’s Pierre. He’s a Dominican-Haitian. Black as the ace of spades, and he’s got a heart of gold. Pierre is a good man, un hombre bueno.”
He went on to explain that Pierre, who had a lot of experience, had already filed a flight plane from Key West to the Bahamas, without mentioning any stop along the way. “You’ll like flying with him,” Anastacio said.
“I’m sure,” said Alex, although she wasn’t. “This doesn’t strike anyone at Key West airport as suspicious?” Alex asked.
“Why would it?” Guarneri asked.
“Pierre runs an overnight air courier service. Completely legit,” Anastacio said. “He flies from here to Grand Bahama and Andros Bahamas five times a week. That’s why we use him for special drops.”
“But anyone looking at the flight records is going to see a disparity in the flying times,” Alex said. “What’s the normal time to Grand Bahama from Key West? Maybe ninety minutes?”
“About that. Give or take,” Anastacio said.
“So Pierre’s going to need an extra hour at least to divert to the north shore of Cuba,” she said, sipping water. “Anyone checking the flying time later is going to spot that. It’s probably not a problem, but I’m just saying …”
Anastacio smiled. “Your girl here is smart,” he said, looking to Guarneri. “That part gets taken care of,” Anastacio he answered, looking back to Alex.
“Friendly folks at Key West?” she asked.
“Better,” Anastacio said. “We have two radios. Pierre takes off low, stays under two hundred feet until he’s six miles out into the Straits of Florida, stays under the radar most of the way. After he makes his drop off the north shore of Cuba, he radios back here, and we coordinate a call to coincide with that take-off. That way he arrives in Grand Bahama right on time.”
“But he’s in air space he shouldn’t be in,” she said.
“Yeah, and in a few hours you’re going to be on a beach you shouldn’t be on. Around here, this part of the ocean, people know better than to ask too many questions. So who’s going to know? Who’s going to do something?”
“No one, hopefully,” Alex said. “And hopefully the air space is empty.”
Anastacio shrugged. “It usually is,” he said with a smirk. “And if somebody else is in it, it’ll only happen once.”
Guarneri tapped Alex’s hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Stuff like this goes down all the time between Miami and Havana. It takes care of itself.”
“Let’s hope so,” she said.
“You’re jittery,” Paul said.
“I’ve seen things go off the rails too many times,” she said.
“Who hasn’t?” Paul answered. He pondered. “Let’s add a final fillip to our disaster plan,” he said. “If everything goes haywire at any point and we get separated, there’s a nice hotel in Havana called Hotel Ambos Mundos.”
“Both worlds,” she said, translating.
“Obviously, the two worlds are Cuba and everywhere else,” he said. “But it’s an Old Havana place. Dates back to the 1920s. Big pink place on a corner, half dozen stories or so, I’m told. Cuban owned, popular with European tourists.”
“So what’s the point?” she asked.
“If there’s a major screw up,” he said, “go there and sit in the lobby. Let’s say from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., more if you can, and just wait. We’ll each try to find our way there.”
“I assume it’s easy to find if it’s a tourist place.”
“You can assume that,” Paul said. “There’s one other thing, … and take this any way you want.”
“Go ahead,” she said. She finished her sandwich as well as her water.
“There are some nasty people in Havana who consider me a friend, some nasty people who hate my guts. It’s a family thing going back a generation. There’s some messy stuff to be done, but I’m doing it; you’re not. Okay?”
“Want to tell me what it is?”
“I already did. Grabbing the money and moving it.”
“And there’s nothing else?”
A long pause, then, “Nope,” he said.
“You remember about how I warned you about lying to me,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’t ‘mean’ anything. It’s a reminder.”
“Point taken,” he said.
“I hope so,” she said.
“Wake me up when it’s time to leave,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he said.
She went back upstairs and crashed onto the bed. It took several minutes just to unwind, to gather her senses. For some reason – nerves, stress, the weight of baggage, the emotional outburst, the slap, cramped passage in the small aircraft and van – her shoulder was killing her. Or maybe it was just subconsciously reminding her of her own mortality. She lay down in her clothes. Then she pleasantly surprised herself, despite the fact that Cuba, about a hundred miles away, was beckoning. She was, when she finally calmed, able to sleep.
On the bed in Anastacio’s house, in the middle of a muggy Florida night, Alex blinked awake on the morning of June tenth. The door to the room was open. Paul Guarneri was sitting on the edge of her bed, gently shaking her.
“Come on, Alex,” he said. “The pilot’s here. LaReina made coffee. We can take it with us with some rolls. Got to move.”
She sat up and blinked. The new day was unwelcome. Beyond the window the sky was still dark. It was the middle of the night. Then part of her indignation from the previous night started to simmer. “Okay,” she grumbled. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Let’s just get this done, Paul,” she said. “For both our sakes.”
“I agree.”
He got up and left the room, leaving the door partly open. A harsh light flooded in from the hallway. She waited a moment, then another, then threw off the sheet and blanket. She was on her feet, stepping into her shoes.
Five minutes later, she was downstairs, her waterproof emergency kit strapped to her thigh where otherwise one might carry a gun or a knife. Her gun was on her ankle, also in waterproof packing. Her duffel was in her hand.
True to his word, Anastacio was awake, as was LaReina, who had packed a bag with breakfast rolls and thermoses of coffee, as promised. She was barefoot and wore a thin T-shirt and a pair of men’s boxers, her legs tan and supple with a cat tattoo on the back of her left calf. She handed each of the voyagers a stash of granola bars wrapped in waterproof foil. Alex jammed two into her pockets. She went to her purse to pack a pen also. She looked for her silver Tiffany pen, the one her boss had once given her, and couldn’t find it. Nor, in her tiredness, could she recall when she had last seen it.
Anastacio glanced at his watch. He held the back door open and led Guarneri and Alex toward the pier. The plane’s engine was not yet running.
A huge black man, Pierre, sat in the pilot’s seat of the Cessna. He gave his two passengers a big toothy grin, then opened the passenger door. He extended a hand to help Alex aboard, then pulled Guarneri up.
“?Bienandanza!” Anastacio said. “Godspeed, both of you!”
“?Vayan con dios!” LaReina added.
In the dark, they held up their hands and waved. Pierre pulled the door closed. The only light was from the house and, an instant later, the airplane’s interior. Anastacio gave the fuselage a push with his two hands, and the plane eased back from the pier. Pierre settled into the pilot’s chair and cranked the engine. The plane came to life. The engine revved louder, and the aircraft turned quickly on the water to face southward over the straits. Alex and Guarneri settled into their seats next to each other, immediately behind the pilot, and buckled in.
“?Listos, mis amigos?” Pierre yelled.
“Ready!” Alex called back.
Paul gave a thumbs-up.
“?Vamos!” Pierre yelled.
A second later, Pierre slammed the throttle forward and they were hurtling across the choppy water. They skimmed the surface for a moment and lifted off; they went upward in a low flat ascent, and then they were on their way. Pierre was flying by the stars and by radar. He had illuminated no exterior lights.
Alex peered over his shoulder. The altimeter leveled out at four hundred feet and stayed there. Alex heaved a nervous sigh and said a short prayer. There were some air pockets and down-drafts, and the plane shook, dipped, and bounced back up for more. She loved this kind of excitement – and hated it at the same time. She felt like a gambler who kept going to a casino with the rent money; deep down, the gambler knows she’s eventually going to lose, but the excitement is worth the risk. She wondered why she did it. She couldn’t answer her question.
She had another thought. All the crazy flights I’ve taken, and all the disreputable men I’ve flown with, and all the places I’ve gone- why hasn’t common sense stopped me?
Then the flight smoothed. Hardly a bump.
Pierre reached for a makeshift ashtray by his controls, which was nothing more than a crushed Pabst Beer can. He opened his side window in deference to a lady being present and relit a cigar that had been sitting there half-smoked. He worked it hard in his white teeth and soon had a good cloud of smoke going, most of which he blew out the window. To Alex the cigar stench was awful, and to make matters worse, Pierre seemed to be chewing it as much as smoking it.
“You can’t tell me the Cuban navy doesn’t have radar or border security,” Alex said to Guarneri. “Don’t they ever spot planes coming in?”
“Not usually,” Guarneri said. “Not if you fly low enough.” There was a long pause, and the sound of the Cessna’s engine droned smoothly in the darkness. Outside the port wing of the aircraft, the lights of the distant sleeping islands twinkled peaceably on the horizon. “There’s always exceptions, but not usually. It’s like anything else. Set the plane down, get back in the air quickly, move fast, and beat anyone who’s after you.” He paused. “Let’s face it. This whole area of the Caribbean is notoriously corrupt. Money changes hands; authorities look the other way. Works that way in Florida, works that way in Cuba, and it’s the only way it works in the Bahamas. The U.S. Coast Guard intercepts a couple of thousand homemade rafts every year. Know how many planes they pick off? Less than a hundred. I looked into it. What does that tell you?”
“There are more rafts than planes,” said Alex. “What if they do intercept us?”
“They won’t,” Guarneri said. “First, we’re not doing anything illegal. The flight manifest shows us leaving from Key West to go to the Bahamas. That’s where Pierre continues to. The plane itself doesn’t do anything illegal. It just sets us down, and we do what we have to. You told me yourself that your employers know where you are and where you’re going. So I have a hunch this plan has a bit of a look-the-other-way from the U.S. Coast Guard anyway. No one’s going to examine whether the flying time was two hours from the Keys or one.”
“Or whether two passengers get off or none.”
Guarneri laughed. “What passengers?” he asked. “We’re invisible, you and me, aren’t we? We don’t exist.” He grabbed the manifest from under Pierre’s Dominican passport. He showed it to Alex. There was a big fat zero where the list of passengers was stated.
“How’d you fix that?” Alex asked.
“Pierre filled it out. No one checked,” said Guarneri.
“And no one chose to look either,” she said.
“Describe it that way if you want. Look, everything’s copacetic. We’ll be back home in six days, and you’ll have wonderful stories to tell.”
“Right,” she said. “Meanwhile I’m keeping my gun strapped tight to my ankle.”
“Yeah, good idea.”
The sound of the engine adjusted, and the plane made a dip. Up ahead, distant and emerging through the haze straight in front of the pilot, Alex could see the shoreline of Cuba and the lights of Havana, knotted together on the horizon like little stars. To the left, eastward, she could see a smaller clump of lights that she assumed was Manzanas, which was nearer their destination than Havana. She looked out the window and could see the surface of the water, reflecting the sky and the lights from shore and the occasional fishing boat – or what she hoped were fishing boats – anchored, their dim red and green lights winking on the surface of the water.
Pierre beckoned Guarneri forward and indicated something.
The pilot flew with night goggles and kept consulting a homing device. Alex assumed that he had spotted their rendezvous craft. Alex knew this was one of the trickier parts of the operation, dropping human cargo, particularly nonexistent cargo, with a rendezvous at sea.
Guarneri ended the conversation with a nod and settled beside her. “He’s got our contact vessel lined up,” Guarneri said. “We should be on the water in five minutes.”
They were. Pierre brought the plane in with a hard bump, three bounces, and a long easy skid. The aircraft glided through the water like a dark swan. The propeller decelerated and spun to a stop. Pierre cut the engines to a low idle. Off the port side, in the darkness, a small sailboat turned toward them. Its sails were not hoisted. It had nets for fish. The plane bobbed up and down with the waves. Alex guessed they were about a mile and a half offshore.
