Adios Muchachos (14 page)

“I’m a couple of years older than him, and at that time I had gone through a great many things. By the age of eighteen, I had experienced the barricades in Paris and then the bohemian life in a very liberal environment. On a visit back to Holland, I found Rieks on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Some good-for-nothing punk was blackmailing him and he was terrified that his father would find out that he was gay (
pédé
, we used to say then).

“Well, I freed him from that piece of shit and convinced him that he should just come out and tell his father before he found out some other way, which he certainly would. I told him that his father would have to accept him as he was because he was no longer a child, and no amount of therapy or threats were going to change the fact that he was gay.

“From that day on, I became his confidant; he used to write to me in Paris to tell me his problems and ask for my advice …”

The insufferable Big Ben-ish
ding dong ding dong
of the front door intercom interrupted van Dongen’s reminiscences. “Yes, this is van Dongen, but I’m not …” he was saying, looking at Carmen and arching his eyebrows to let her know that something was wrong. “Yes, yes … Is it serious? … Yes, bring him up.”

He pressed the nine on the telephone and waited for the click that indicated that the door had opened. Then, turning to Carmen: “It’s a taxi driver who says that Victor King, the one I told you about in the company, has been in some sort of accident. I’m going down to help them.”

Standing on the terrace, Carmen could see the taxi with the door open and the motor running. “It must be serious.”

Jan rushed down the stairs just as the taxi driver and Victor King were coming though the threshold of the front door.

“Señor, you are Doctor Bandongon?”

Alicia parked Rieks’s Volvo right next to the Malecón entrance to the Riviera Hotel. The waves crashing against the seawall were coming in continuous trains and there was no one on the street except a few kids riding their bikes through the spray. She hurried to memorize her next tasks and review the ones she had already completed to make certain that nothing was left out.

Alicia pulled on the door handle to unlock it but left it against the jamb. She took a final look up and down the Malecón, removed her gloves, and pushed the door open with her elbow to avoid leaving prints. A fast sprint through the mist and she was in the great lobby, where her shapeless blonde persona was no more noticeable than any one of the droves of shapeless blond snowbirds who moved through the Riviera lobby every hour.

Coming out the main entrance, she had one of the doormen call her a cab and then asked the driver to take her to the Habana Libre Hotel.

As soon as the taxi pulled out of the hotel driveway, Alicia slid right behind the driver where she could not be seen, took some hairpins and the bandana out of her purse, and fashioned herself a turban that completely hid the long blond hair of her wig.

Standing between the alarmed Jan and Carmen, who had been jolted out of the peace and quiet of an otherwise uneventful day at home, and the hysterical driver, who had not stopped talking about how Havana was not what it used to be when he was a boy, Victor examined his swollen, black-and-blue wrists with that silly grin that drunks get when they start nodding and humming to themselves. He finally began to hear what the driver was saying.

“… flat on his face in the woods, right on the path along the riverbank … hands wired behind his back … tape all over his mouth and eyes … a hood over his head … just imagine … I … he …”

Victor laid a comforting hand on the driver’s shoulder to shut him up and addressed van Dongen in English: “I’m sorry about this, Jan, but this was the closest place, and I couldn’t afford to get the police involved in this … Could I have some water, please?”

“Sure, Vic,” van Dongen answered as he walked into the kitchen.

While he was out of the room, Carmen examined Victor’s wounds. “The savages … How could they do this to you?”

Victor took the glass from van Dongen and twisted his face into a grimace of pain. His face was terribly swollen and the burst capillaries under his cheekbones looked nasty.

He drank the water in three gulps with an unsteady hand, a thin rivulet leaking out of the side of his mouth. “Yes … They grabbed me by the hair and the back of my neck and beat my face against the side of the car … I don’t know how manytimes. And then on the ground they kicked me a while … a few times … I don’t know … but wait …” Victor dropped into a chair and dug into his pocket for some money to get rid of the taxi driver. The effort brought on a wave of pain and he stopped to catch his breath. He removed a hundreddollar bill from his wallet and gave it to the cabby.

“Hey, I don’t have change for that!”

“You don’t have to; it’s yours.”

“
Gracias,
señor, but … ”

“That’s fifty for helping me and fifty for forgetting all about this. You think you can forget you ever saw me?”

“I already forgot,” he joked, taking a card from his shirt pocket, “and if you ever need me to forget anything else, please call me at this number.”

“Esta bien
,” Victor nodded, shaking his hand without rising from the chair.

Carmen walked the driver to the front door and hurried back to the living room.

Victor took a deep breath like a weightlifter preparing for an Olympic clean and jerk, and felt his pockets …

“Have one of mine,” van Dongen offered, handing him a black cylindrical package of English cigarettes.

Victor took one with a trembling hand and van Dongen lit it for him, silent … waiting …

“They’ve kidnapped Rieks!”

Carmen gasped, covering her mouth with both hands, “Mother of God!”

The Dutchman remained completely calm, but swallowed hard, very hard, and in his effort to keep a stiff upper lip, succeeded in producing an incredible vibration in the tip his nose. “OK, I’ll get the car and you can give me the details on the way to the hospital.”

“Yes, there’s one a couple of blocks—” Carmen added, as Victor protested, “No hospital!”

“Don’t be silly. You’re in terrible condition,” van Dongen insisted.

“Jan,” Victor interrupted, about half an octave too high, “they’ll kill Rieks …”

“What do you mean?”

“If you take me to the hospital, they’ll report it to the police and the kidnappers might do anything,” he explained, pausing to recover from the physical and mental pain of the revelation. “Besides, I don’t need a doctor, just some rest and …”

Van Dongen sat across from Victor while Carmen knelt by the butterfly chair to take his pulse.

“Tachycardia!”

Victor squinted and shook his head to indicate that it was not that serious.

“Don’t shake your head at me; you need a tranquilizer right now and I have …”

“Carmen, it’s just the scare they gave me; in a couple of minutes, I’m going to pass out from sheer exhaustion and I have to … What time is it, anyway? Those bastards took my watch.”

“It’s ten past six,” van Dongen replied, adding, “you can stay in the guest room as long as you need; just fill me in on what happened so I can get things moving.”

“Thank you, Jan. Call Bos; tell him to get over here as soon as possible. Can you do that?”

“Of course,” van Dongen said, leading Victor to the guest room and sitting him on the edge of the bed.

“Wait. On second thought, make that in about an hour or so … I don’t think I can keep my eyes open much longer. But we have to meet this evening … The ransom has to be decided tonight … I’m afraid to think what …”

“Victor! Get hold of yourself. Tell me what has to be done and I’ll get on it right now,” van Dongen ordered.

“First of all, no police—”

“How much do they want?” van Dongen interrupted.

“Plenty! Four million.”

Jan van Dongen closed his eyes and whistled lightly under his breath.

When the taxi arrived at the Habana Libre Hotel, the woman who stepped out was no longer the shapeless blonde who had left the Volvo on the Malecón and walked through the Riviera lobby, but with her sandals, dark glasses, turban, and loose dress, she was not Alicia either.

After buying a bar of white Toblerone in the hotel shop, Alicia took another taxi and on the five-block trip to the corner of Linea and L, she slipped the wig and turban into her purse, hiked the sack above her knees, and put on a broad yellow belt. Now the woman who walked the remaining blocks to the white convertible was definitely the alluring Alicia.

She arrived at her mother’s at exactly 17:33.

Margarita noticed that her daughter was exhausted and on the verge of collapse, so she settled for a two-minute summary of the day’s action and then went off to draw Alicia’s bath and get her something to eat.

Calmed by the hot bath and freed of her hunger by a few slices of cold lobster with Thousand-Island dressing, Alicia dropped into her bed.
God, I never want to go through another day like this one.

In another part of the city, Victor was thinking exactly the same thing, and calculating that the swelling produced by the allergic reaction to the drugs would begin to disappear by about eight. The tachycardia, however, would probably last until well after midnight. “That’s just fine,” he muttered to himself, staring up from the bed into the intense blue of the eastern sky.

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

Victor, Jan van Dongen, and Karl Bos were seated around the dining room table. Karl Bos was a big man in his early fifties, with wavy red hair streaked with silver. People who knew him superficially thought he fit the stereotype of the Jolly Red Giant because, although he told the most terrible jokes, he laughed so hard at them that it was simply contagious. He and his wife made the perfect pair. A great black woman from the Netherlands Antilles, she somehow managed to speak only
Papiamento,
and the only words she had ever been heard to say in any other language were “yes” and “thank you.” Whenever anyone said that her English was flawless, she invariably responded,
“Mi ta papia masha bon
,” and laughed with her entire being.

As Managing Director of Groote International Inc. in Cuba, the Giant was anything but jolly or red; he was a hardnosed, savvy manager who dressed in the most impeccable, non-fashionable business style, carried a silver cigarette case and holder set, wore brilliantine, and crossed his hair under his occipital region. On this occasion he was wearing a business gray with a maroon tie. His sartorial perfection contrasted with Victor’s disastrous appearance.

The swelling on Victor’s forehead, now covered, seemed to be getting bigger, and he looked at least ten years older. His face, which had been covered with bright red splotches, was now a greenish pale with taupe aprons under his eyes. Carmen kept insisting that he go to the hospital, because his pulse was around one hundred and his blood pressure was much too high, but Victor refused, just as he refused to change into one of Jan’s shirts. He sat at the table, chainsmoking, with his green denim shirt smudged on the chest and torn at the armpit. His voice was weak and shaky.

Carmen brought an ice bucket and some glasses. Bos took two ice cubes and poured himself two fingers of Scotch. Van Dongen put a new cassette into the recorder on the table and discreetly signaled Carmen to leave them alone. Then he put the microphone in front of Victor.

“May we begin, Jan?” Bos asked.

Van Dongen nodded and looked at Victor, who leaned slightly into the microphone.

“I was writing my report when Rieks called, but not from Varadero, where I thought he was. He told me he had gotten up with a terrible hangover from the evening’s drinks and that he had put off his trip to the beach until after lunch. He asked me to stop off at the house because he had something he wanted me to give to Jan. I took the file and walked the few yards between my house and his; and as I entered the house, a gun was put to my head and a hooded man said, ‘Freeze!’ ”

“In English?”

“Exactly! He ordered me to put my hands behind my back, and another one tied me up with wire. Look at those wrists!”

Victor rotated his hands so that Bos could see the damage the wire had done to his wrists. He poured himself two inches neat, took a swallow, made a terrible face, and continued. Bos took notes and van Dongen stared into the distance.

“There were three of them, but I think one of them was a woman, or something, because there was a strong smell of Chanel No. 5 …”

“Were they Cubans?”

“I don’t think so. The only one who spoke had a terrible New York accent.”

“Was Rieks present when they threatened you?”

“Yes, he was, but I didn’t see him until later because they had him tied up in one of the corners of the room behind my back.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing! Not a word … Later, when they took us out of the house, they taped our eyes and mouths, and put the hoods on our heads.”

Bos took the hood and examined it, quite impressed.

“Then they took us into the garage and made us get into Rieks’s Volvo. According to my calculations, we drove around for about forty minutes without leaving the city. Then we got to another garage or shed, a lot more rustic, with a dirt floor.”

“Could you hear any background noises?” Jan asked.

“Yes … some shouting in the distance … probably children playing.”

Victor grimaced with pain and breathed with difficulty. “Can I have some water, please?”

Jan set the recorder on
pause
while Bos twisted the cap off a bottle of water. Victor gulped half of the glass down with streams of water shooting out of the corners of his mouth. He seemed to have lost control of his facial muscles.

“Let’s leave this for later,” Bos proposed.

“No,” Victor insisted, “it’s OK now. It was just a dizzy spell.”

As soon as he recovered, Victor went on for another ten minutes detailing the atmosphere of extreme intimidation in which the kidnappers outlined the conditions of the ransom. With a broken voice, and instinctively lowering his volume, Victor described the terrible reprisals they said would be inflicted on Rieks if their demands were not met in full. They wanted no less than four million dollars by November 17.

“They’ll call the office soon to give us the details of how to deliver the ransom money. Then they’ll give us the time to raise the cash. The guy said they would kill him if the money wasn’t delivered exactly as specified.”

At that point, Victor held back a sob and covered his eyes. He had to take a few minutes before continuing. His voice was shaking and his face was such a disaster that Bos and van Dongen again insisted on taking him to the hospital, but he refused.

“Just a minute …”

“Fine, if you feel better later and you remember more details, you can record them on another cassette,” van Dongen suggested. “The slightest detail may be important.”

“Jan is right. The family, or even Rieks himself, may later decide to bring in the police.”

“I hope they don’t decide to do anything foolish,” Victor commented, staring down at his wrists. “It might be terrible for Rieks.”

Half an hour later, Bos and Jan got Victor into the car to drive him home. Along the way they insisted that he see a doctor, but he declined. Finally they dropped him off and headed back to town.

Jan van Dongen took his gaze off the highway for an instant to look Bos right in the eye.

“How are we going to raise that much cash?”

“We can’t do anything until Vincent, Christina, and the rest of the family hear Victor’s tape.”

“Of course, that’s the first step,” van Dongen agreed, “but it’s not going to be easy to raise that kind of money.”

Bos pulled out his palm computer and made a number of entries that van Dongen could not catch out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m going to take the recording to Amsterdam personally. I only hope I can get on a plane tomorrow. And don’t worry about the money. Two hours after Vincent gives the word, we’ll have the cash all ready and counted.”