Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 924 & 925, September/October 2018

The Cuban Prisoner by John Lantigua

John Lantigua is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who made his fiction debut in 1988 with the Edgar-nominated Heat Lightning. He is best known, as a action writer, for his Willie Cuesta private-eye series, to which this new story (as well as several earlier tales for EQMM) belongs. Recently, all four novels in the Cuesta series were reissued in e-editions.

Private investigator Willie Cuesta leaned against a palm tree in a park just blocks from his Little Havana home, watching seven-year-olds play soccer. The kids dashed madly up and down the field in their striped jerseys, occasionally running into collisions that left several of them strewn on the grass. They sprang up right away and took off hell bent in the opposite direction, the careening ball never firmly in anyone’s control and never quite making it into a net. On the sidelines, parents cheered them, gossiped a bit, and then cheered some more when their kid touched the ball. Willie understood why soccer had become such a popular sport in the U.S.: If you wanted to tire out your seven-year-old so that he or she went to sleep early and soundly, allowing you to sit comfortably with your carafe of wine, you nudged your child into soccer. In Willie’s young days, he had played a lot of baseball, a more static, contemplative game, and had never wanted to sleep. His mother would have been better served if she’d been born thirty years later.

A pileup occurred near one goal, a whistle sounded, and the referee called for a penalty kick. A young player with a mop of jet black hair reared back, booted the ball at a forty-five-degree angle, far from the net, into the crowd, and hung his head. Shouts of reassurance rang out and the mad scramble resumed.

“Mr. Cuesta?”

Willie turned to a woman who had walked up. She was about forty, raven-haired, attractive, wearing a lime-green blouse, black Capri pants, and comfortable mom sneakers for standing on the sidelines.

“You’re Ursula Estevez?” Willie asked.

“Si, señor.” They shook hands.

Willie had received a call from Ms. Estevez about two hours before, midmorning Saturday. She said she might need his services. He had asked her what her problem was, but she preferred to meet in person. Her son was playing in a soccer game that started at noon not far from Willie’s house and he had agreed to meet her.

“Which of the boys is yours?” he asked.

She pointed at the organized disorder on the field.

“Number nine, in green.”

Willie saw a smallish kid with her black hair and pale skin scurrying around the fringes of the action.

“But he’s not why I called you. It’s my mother, his grandmother.” She pointed to the end of the line of spectators, where an elderly woman sat about ten feet from the sideline in a canvas chair. She wore a flowered dress, a sun visor, and shades. Her hair was brown, although almost certainly with the help of her hairdresser. Willie guessed that she was in her mid to late seventies. She was fixed on the field of play with a smile on her face, apparently content watching her grandson, and probably not all that concerned with the score.

“She appears to be doing pretty well,” Willie said. “She looks happy.”

Ursula Estevez nodded. “Yes, right now she is especially happy. But I’m worried that someone is out to take advantage of her, possibly hurt her, and that her life could turn very dark. I’m worried that would finish her.”

The statement was stark and was matched by her tone.

“You better tell me what’s going on,” Willie said.

A park bench stood nearby and they sat on it, still able to see the field and the lady in question. Ms. Estevez folded her hands on her lap.

“My parents escaped Cuba in the early nineteen sixties, soon after Castro took power. Like a lot of other Cuban exiles, they settled here in Miami. They started an insurance business together, largely serving other Cubans, and in time it did very well. Once they were solidly on their feet, my sister and I were born. Everything continued to go well and they retired a few years ago with a comfortable nest egg. Their only plan was to spend as much time as possible enjoying their grandkids.”

She gestured toward the obviously contented lady in the canvas chair.

“But something must have spoiled that plan,” Willie said.

Ursula’s lips curdled and she nodded.

“My father died two years ago of a heart attack. From one moment to the next he was taken from us. Because of their history, escaping Cuba together, my parents had been unusually close, and my mother was lost. I mean terribly, terribly lost. She cried for months and then she was almost completely quiet for many months more. She was so sad we were afraid she might do something to hurt herself. She refused to move in with either me or my sister because she didn’t want to leave the house that reminded her of him. We had to be there as much as possible to make sure she was all right and didn’t do anything crazy.”

She stopped to take a breath and Willie nodded in commiseration.

“My father died several years ago and my mother is a widow. I understand. Go on.”

She stared off across the park. “Finally, we and an older lady friend convinced her to get out of the house. She started to go for walks and lunches with this friend. And eventually this lady even convinced her to go to the community center for the elderly here in Little Havana. People meet there to play dominoes and canasta, or just to talk. I can’t tell you how relieved my sister and I were when this happened. We had been worried sick for months about her and now we finally saw her coming back to life.”

“Well, that all sounds good.”

Ursula rolled her eyes. “Yes, it was too good. One day she was at the community center playing dominoes when a man sat down at her table as part of the foursome. His name is Norman Cruz. He is a man in his sixties, about ten years younger than my mother. He is handsome, tall, well built, just as my father was. He told my mother that he had come from Cuba only recently. When my mother asked him why it had taken him so long to leave the island, he told her it was because he had been held for more than twenty years as a political prisoner in Castro’s jails and had only recently been released.”

She fixed on Willie.

“You can easily imagine what that meant to my mother. She despises the Castros and here was a man who had lost twenty years of his life because of his courageous opposition to them. She was dizzy with admiration for him.”

Willie nodded. He had grown up in the Cuban exile community as well and knew that former political prisoners were greeted in Miami like heroes returned from the wars. There was no greater position of honor in the exile world. But Ursula wasn’t finished with her tale.

“From one moment to the next, my mother was in love with this man. She had missed my father so much and now God had sent someone to take his place. They started spending almost all their time together and now, just six weeks after they met, my mother has announced that they are going to be married next month. We have no idea who this man is, Mr. Cuesta. My mother is a woman of some wealth and at a very vulnerable stage of her life. We need to make sure she is not simply being taken advantage of.”

“So you need me to do background checks on his Norman Cruz.”

She looked pained. “We have a family lawyer and he has tried to do that. But the Cuban government won’t give any information on who was or wasn’t a political prisoner.”

That didn’t surprise Willie. Governments, in general, didn’t admit to having political prisoners at all. Everybody in jail was catalogued as a common criminal.

“And the lawyer has also tried to get information here locally,” Ursula said. “There is an organization of former political prisoners here, but they admit they don’t know everyone ever held in those prisons. Dozens of detention centers exist all over the island. They found an old listing in human-rights records of an N. Cruz, but nothing else about him. This man Cruz says he was held in a small facility in the city of San Sebastian on the eastern end of the island. The lawyer found that there is a detention center there, but he could find no one else who was detained in that facility and who might know Cruz.”

“How about members of Cruz’s family? Most exiles have family here. They would have information about him.”

Ursula shook her head. “He says he was an only child, that his parents died when he was young, and that he lost touch with other relatives while he was in prison. He has no one here.”

Willie soaked that all in. He was starting to comprehend Ursula’s plight.

“So you need someone who can size this guy up — get enough out of him to determine whether he’s on the up and up.”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

Willie stared at the elderly woman propped in the chair, then at the young soccer players galloping up and down the field, and back at Ursula — three generations of Cubans. He gave Ursula his day rate, advised her that he needed a two-day minimum upfront, and moments later she had made out a check. Willie tucked it away.

“Okay. I want you to contact Mr. Cruz and tell him a representative of the family wants to talk to him, to welcome him to the clan and firm up some details on the wedding. Whatever. Have him call me.”

One of the kids on the field finally scored a goal and a great cheer went up. The lady in the canvas chair clapped. Willie wondered if she would still be clapping when he finished his investigation.

He went home and warmed some leftover chicken and rice for lunch. Then he turned on his laptop, brought up Google, and looked for information on Cuban prisons. He found a list that went province by province and even included some photos of the facilities. About one hundred prisons were listed, including the San Sebastian unit in Santiago province. The photo showed a boxlike cement structure about three stories high, which might have been a very unattractive public-housing project, except all the windows were blocked with bars and it was surrounded by a tall wall with barbed wire on top and guard towers rising high at each comer.

Willie left that site and found others that named political prisoners. The long lists he scanned named people imprisoned over the years, but the compilers warned that the logs were not complete. They wrote that some persons who were in fact political prisoners had been convicted of trumped-up common crimes, or were simply never listed as prisoners of any kind by the government. Willie scanned the lists nevertheless, but did not find the name Norman Cruz.

Many of the sites were run by human-rights groups and included reports of troubles at the facilities — mistreatment of prisoners, hunger strikes, prison riots, et cetera. A couple involved the San Sebastian facility. He scribbled down notes, closed the sites, and moved on to other business.

In addition to his private-investigations firm, Willie served as chief of security for the Latin dance club Caliente, run by his brother Tommy. It was the most popular Latin club in the city, wall-to-wall people, especially on the weekend nights, rum and tequila flowing like rivers, and it required plenty of staff Willie spent the next hour making out schedules for the security details, posting that information, and confirming payroll figures for already completed shifts.

He was just finishing all that when his cell phone sounded. He answered and found a man with a deep but soft voice on the other end.

“Is this Mr. Cuesta?”

“Yes, it is.”

“This is Norman Cruz calling. Ursula Estevez asked me to contact you. I understand you want to meet me?”

He spoke slowly, cautiously.

“Yes, that’s right. I was hoping we could get together sometime today. Would that be possible for you?”

The other man took several moments to think that over.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Maybe we could meet for dinner. Normally I would eat with Lydia, that is Ursula’s mother, but today she has another matter to attend. Maybe we could meet at a restaurant near where I live. It’s called Café Santiago.”

“Yes, I know where that is. Right on Calle Ocho.”

Calle Ocho — Eighth Street — was the main drag in Little Havana.

“That’s right,” Cruz said. “Can you meet me there at five o’clock?”

Willie frowned. That was early for dinner and especially for Cubans, who liked to eat late. The other man seemed to read his mind.

“I know that’s very early, but that was when they fed us in prison and I have found it a habit hard to break.”

Willie didn’t argue. He described what he would be wearing — black silk shirt and cream pants — so that Cruz would recognize him. Then they signed off and Willie went back to his accounts.

He arrived at the restaurant about five minutes early. Café Santiago was small — maybe twelve tables — and certainly nothing fancy. Those tables were Formica. The chairs were made of well-aged wood. The decor consisted of faded black-and-white photos of the beautiful Cuban colonial city of Santiago and of its local beaches. The lights were hanging fluorescents and the food was cooked right behind the Formica serving bar.

What was luxurious about the place were the aromas emanating from the stoves and ovens. Right then they must have been roasting and/or frying the pork dishes for the expected dinner crowd. The air was suffused with the delicious scents of the meat, seasoned with traditional Cuban spices. Willie — given his Cuban-American nose — also picked up the aroma of boiled yucca smothered in butter and onions, as well as the narcotic nose treat that was fried sweet plantains. He had walked in not hungry at all. Within five minutes his mouth was watering.

Norman Cruz arrived at exactly five P.M. Willie knew who it was right away because he matched the description provided by Ursula. He was tall — about six feet — somewhere in his sixties, square-shouldered, and ruggedly handsome. His complexion was sallow — fitting for a man who had spent years in a prison. His cheekbones and chin were pronounced, his cheeks hollowed. His eyes were narrowed in a squint and were gray, approximately the color of concrete. He wore a white shirt with black stripes and gray dress pants. The clothes looked new, just as Willie had often seen with recently arrived exiles from Cuba. After years of living under a communist government, most often meagerly, when they arrived in the U.S. they got makeovers.

Cruz fixed on Willie, identified the black shirt, and shuffled over.

“Mr. Cuesta?” It was the same deep but quiet voice he’d heard over the phone.

Willie stood, they shook hands, and Cruz sat to the left of Willie, not across the table from him. He smiled slightly and pointed toward the entrance.

“I never sit with my back to the door. Any door.”

“Is that something that comes from your years in prison?”

Cruz shook his head. “No, actually it began during my time in the anti-Castro underground, although I kept it as a rule in prison as well. There were many men who could be dangerous there too. Especially the guards.”

A waitress brought menus and Cruz considered his.

“Order anything you want,” Willie said. “It’s on me.”

The other man’s eyes flared. He liked that idea. He closed his menu and when the waitress came over he ordered an appetizer of fried pork chunks, a black-bean soup, a churrasco steak, with rice, beans, fried plantains, and a beer. Despite the seductive aromas all around, Willie decided it was still a bit too early to eat and ordered only the beer.

Once the waitress was gone, Cruz looked at him sheepishly.

“I eat a lot of meat. They say it isn’t good for you, but I went so many years almost never getting meat in prison that I can’t resist.”

He dipped into the basket on the table and buttered a piece of Cuban bread.

“This also we didn’t get much of,” he said, biting into it lustily.

“You were in the prison at San Sebastian?”

Cruz nodded, still chewing. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Did you know a political prisoner there by the name of Alberto Ramos?”

It was a name Willie had found in the online accounts of human-rights disputes at the prison.

Cruz swallowed his bread and swigged his beer. “Oh yes. We all knew Alberto. He was famous for once managing to escape. He did it by hoarding salt, then rubbing it all over his body very hard, which caused a terrible, bleeding rash. That got him admitted to the infirmary. Late that first night he snuck to a phone, called the local civilian hospital, passed himself off as the prison doctor, and ordered an ambulance to have himself transferred to that hospital. With no doctor on duty that late, other prisoners on orderly duty carried him out. Once at the hospital, he ran away.”

Cruz chuckled at the memory. “What was brilliant about his scheme was that prisoners planning an escape attempt often hoarded pepper. Once outside they could scatter the pepper in their tracks so that the bloodhounds’ noses would get fouled and they couldn’t be tracked. Alberto did the unexpected; he found a way to use salt. So smart of him.”

Cruz swigged and shrugged.

“Of course, he was caught. Cuba is an island and he didn’t have access to a boat. On an island they have you trapped from the moment you make it out the gate. Do you know what they tell the troops searching for an escaped prisoner in Cuba?”

Willie said he didn’t.

“They tell them look for somebody who is unusually pale. Most Cubans get as much sun as they want. The island has plenty, but inside we got almost none. You escaped, but you looked like an albino and almost as easy to spot. Pale or not, Alberto at least enjoyed a couple of nights with his girlfriend before they grabbed him, although later they locked him in solitary for a long, long time.”

Cruz sipped his beer and so did Willie. What Cruz had related about Alberto Ramos was what Willie had read in the online accounts.

Cruz’s first course came then — the chunks of fried pork. They weren’t very big and Willie would have probably just popped each one in his mouth whole. But Cruz meticulously cut each chunk into three pieces and ate them bit by bit, chewing each morsel thoroughly. It took him a while to finish his appetizer and at one point he noticed Willie’s amusement.

“In prison you learn to eat very slowly, precisely. You have so little to do locked between those walls, you suffer so much boredom, that any activity you stretch out for as long as possible. Even if the meals were awful, as they were in San Sebastian. Sometimes we even found insects in the food. Jokesters called it Asian cuisine because in Asia people sometimes eat insects. But even then we took our time eating.”

At another point he reached across the table for the salt, which was near Willie. He froze, still holding the shaker.

“Now, that is something I would never have done in prison, reach across a dinner table for anything.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because another prisoner would instantly think you were trying to grab his food and you would find your hand pinned to the table,” he said, jabbing his fork down in the direction of the Formica.

He finished his pork and soon his black-bean soup arrived. He savored that, spoonful by spoonful, much as he had his appetizer.

“So I’m told you spent twenty years of your life there,” Willie said.

Cruz shrugged. “That’s what it turned out to be. We didn’t have calendars and you lose count. But yes, just over twenty years.”

“It must be quite a shock to suddenly find yourself free.”

Cruz spooned the last of the soup into his mouth and dabbed his lips with his napkin.

“You don’t realize all that prison has done to you until you are no longer in there. I slept in a large cell-block for years and there were always men snoring, grunting, arguing. That’s not to mention the ones with nightmares, screaming nightmares, because they had been mistreated. That went on every night, but I grew accustomed to it and learned to sleep through it all. Now that I’m out, do you know what wakes me up?”

“No. What?”

“The quiet. Every night I wake up because my mind is searching for the sounds that it’s accustomed to hearing. I lie still and listen, trying to hear something. Anything. The quiet concerns me, scares me.”

He punctuated that thought with a flick of the eyebrows, sipped his beer, and went on.

“Like I told you, I can’t sit with my back to the door. Also, when I was behind bars in Cuba I always kept a shiv tucked into my sock, along my ankle. I had made it from a piece of bedframe. I brought it with me when I left the island and I still have it here where I’m living. I can’t bring myself to throw it away.”

He pointed toward the street.

“Another matter is walking through the city. When I first arrived here I would walk a block or two and then turn around and walk back. It had been so long since I had been able to walk long distances, that my mind would tell me to turn around. Now I walk farther, but I am still very wary, as if I’ve escaped from prison and someone may come after me or even shoot me. Walking with Lydia is curing me of that little by little.”

By this time his steak had arrived and he gazed at it as if he were looking at a beautiful woman. He started to dig in, then stopped and laughed.

“There is another problem I had briefly with the walking.” He pointed down at his shoes. “In prison I always kept any little bit of money I had or anything else small that I valued stuffed in my socks. That way even when I was sleeping no one could rob me. When I first got out, sometimes, without thinking, I would still do that with money. Then I went for a decent walk and I got a blister. Finally, I could go as far as I wanted, but I limped.”

He laughed and dug into his steak. Willie gave him time to enjoy it. Cruz asked Willie absolutely nothing about himself, although Willie sensed he was being sized up by the man across the table just as much as he was sizing up Lydia’s suitor. The gray eyes had an animal wariness to them, just as you might expect from a man who had been in a prison for years.

Willie ordered two more beers and sipped his.

“Do you have contact here in Miami with any of the men you were in prison with?”

Cruz shook his head. “No. The men I was locked up with are either dead now, or they are still stuck in that prison.”

“How was it that they let you go?”

Cruz winced slightly, as if Willie had asked something that made him uncomfortable. Willie wondered for a moment if maybe Cruz had turned into an informer in prison, maybe bought his way out by snitching on fellow inmates. That tended to happen in prisons everywhere. Cruz certainly wouldn’t want anyone to know that, although Willie wasn’t about to judge him. You had to wonder what you yourself might do after twenty years in prison. There was no way of telling. Then again, maybe that wasn’t the reason behind the discomfort. Cruz explained it moments later.

“They were trying to save money by reducing the prison population. So they chose prisoners who had caused the fewest problems. I never joined any of the protests, the hunger strikes. Some of my fellow political prisoners didn’t like that. But once I was in I just wanted to get out as quickly as I could. It still took a long, long time.” He shrugged.

Willie wondered whether Cruz did know of other former San Sebastian inmates in Miami or elsewhere, but didn’t want Willie to talk to them because they would have nothing good to say about him. That could be the source of his uneasiness.

Cruz finished his meal and Willie paid the waitress. They drifted out the door.

“Do you think we could meet again tomorrow, Mr. Cruz? There are some matters regarding the wedding I’d like to discuss with you, but right now I need to be somewhere.”

Willie hadn’t discussed the wedding at all, but that didn’t seem to surprise Cruz. They both knew what was going on: The would-be groom was being vetted. He didn’t argue.

“That will be fine with me,” Cruz said. “Why don’t we meet tomorrow around noon down where they play dominoes.”

Willie knew exactly where he meant, a roofed patio right on Eighth Street where elderly Cubans met to play the Cuban national pastime.

They shook hands. Willie started to turn away but Cruz held his hand and added a final word. “Make sure to watch your back, hombre.”

Cruz continued to grip his hand. Was this a man who had lived twenty years in a dangerous environment giving another man friendly advice? Or was Cruz issuing a not very veiled threat. Willie’s mind flashed to that shiv Norman Cruz had carried with him from San Sebastian. The other man finally let go, turned, and meandered away.

Willie went home, poured himself another beer, sat on his back porch, and stared at his backyard where the mango tree was just starting to bud. He thought about everything Norman Cruz had told him and wondered what he should do next. Halfway through that beer his next move budded as well: He would call his mother.

Willie’s widowed mother, Silvia, was the owner of her own botanica, several blocks east on Eighth Street. It was a narrow storefront where many people — mostly Cubans — showed up with their chronic complaints. Physical, emotional, romantic, economic. You name it. Indigestion, impotence, insolvency, Silvia had a suggested remedy. She would listen at length to the problem — which was a crucial element in the service she offered — and then identify an herb that was indicated for treatment of that malady. Or she would offer the patient the image of a saint who was known to specialize in miraculously curing that condition. The likenesses she featured on her shelves were not just of Catholic saints but of spirits enshrined by the Santeria religion, which Cuban slaves had brought from Africa. She covered all her bases.

The herbs were piled in bins on one side of the store and the plaster casts of religious figures lined shelves on the other. The middle aisle separated the natural from the supernatural, like two sides of the same brain. Her customers consulted with medical doctors for serious illnesses, of course, but they brought their everyday ailments and issues to the botanica, just as they had done back in Cuba. She didn’t charge much; it was a volume business. Willie figured that over the decades almost every family in Little Havana had had dealings with his mama. Consequently, she knew everybody in the neighborhood.

She picked up the phone now, recognizing Willie’s number.

“Finally you call your mother,” she said in Spanish. “You would rather talk to criminals and other strangers than to me.”

This was her standard greeting to him. No matter how often he called it would never be enough. He apologized as he always did, told her he loved her, and then got down to business.

“Mama, who do you know who came here from San Sebastian in Cuba? I need to find someone who knows that city well.”

Silence ensued on the other end as his mother reviewed her internal Rolodex, the vast collection of names and personal stories she had accumulated over the decades. It took her the better part of a minute before she found the right name.

“You should speak with Hilda Sanchez. She came from San Sebastian decades ago, knows everybody else from there and she likes to talk.”

“Where do I find her?”

She described a large, pink, aging Art Deco apartment building just off Twenty-Seventh Avenue, still in Little Havana. Willie was familiar with it.

“You go there and ask for Hilda. Everyone knows her. I’ll call and tell her you’re coming.”

Willie thanked his mother, repeated his love for her, and disconnected. He printed out the information he had on San Sebastian and headed for Hilda’s house.

She was waiting on the steps for him when he arrived — a short, dark, silver-haired lady, about seventy. She led him to a neat second-floor apartment. Willie knew that Cuban exiles were eternally connected to the cities they came from and loved to reminisce. Exile did that to a person. For the next hour he fed Hilda questions about people, places, and events in San Sebastian over the years and listened as she luxuriated in her memories. She brought out old black-and-white snapshots of her own to illustrate her recollections and Willie studied them. At one point, in response to a question from Willie, she even picked up her cell phone and a long-distance calling card, dialed a number in San Sebastian, and put Willie on with an old friend of hers, named Amelia Martinez, who had never left.

Willie stayed on the line with Mrs. Martinez for the next fifteen minutes. By then he had what he needed, thanked her, gave Mrs. Sanchez enough money to buy a new calling card, thanked her too, and headed home. He then made a quick call to his old friend Frankie Lagos, a Miami RD. detective he had worked with before he’d turned private investigator. They agreed to a rendezvous the next day.

At that point, Willie poured himself yet another beer and sat on his back porch poring over what Hilda and her friend had told him. All the time he kept considering the man who called himself Norman Cruz. He was still at it when he went to sleep.

Willie arrived a few minutes early for his meeting with Cruz. The place was popularly called Domino Park, but it was actually a patio about thirty feet square, surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence and covered with a red tile roof. Under that roof sat tables made of thick plastic and especially constructed for the playing of dominoes. The tables included troughs where each of the four players could line up his or her tiles, out of the sight of opposing players. From those troughs the players would choose a tile and slap it down, extending the line of tiles played in one direction or the other. The new number had to match the number last played. A curling snake of dominoes was created and the first team to expend all its tiles was the winner.

Near noon, the twenty tables were always full. The participants were almost all elderly and almost exclusively men. They played, kibitzed, chewed on cigars, and played some more. Those waiting to participate observed the action and offered commentary, adding to the constant hum of conversation in guttural, cigar-smoker Spanish.

At the very back of the patio stood a couple of tables with chessboards imprinted on the surface for anyone who might prefer that game. One of the two tables was empty and Willie sat there, his printed material on the table before him.

A few minutes after noon, Norman Cruz arrived. He sat down across the chess table from Willie, facing the front gate. He was dressed as he had been the night before. Willie couldn’t tell if he was carrying his shiv or not.

Cruz peered around the patio.

“I played a lot of dominoes in prison. We had so little to do that I became quite accomplished at the game.”

Willie gazed around and then back at Cruz.

“It just so happens that my mother has an acquaintance from San Sebastian.”

On the surface, Cruz expressed only mild interest, but behind his gray eyes he was wary. He glanced down at the paperwork lying on the table and at the empty chessboard, as if he were considering a move, then back at Willie.

“Is that so? Well, I doubt very much that I know her. I grew up in a small town in that province but far from the city of San Sebastian. I rarely got there when I was a child and later, the time I spent in the city I was locked up.”

Willie stayed fixed on him. “She told me she went to the school right next to the city hall. The building was painted a light green color and white statues stood along the street in front, heroes of the independence war against Spain.”

Cruz smiled and shrugged. “I don’t really recall.”

“Her family ran the movie theater right on the central square. It was called the Athena and had murals of the Greek gods on the walls inside. Everybody went there to see movies made in Mexico and Spain and American movies too.”

Cruz was shaking his head. “My family were farmers. We didn’t get to the movies.”

Willie cocked his head.

“The government took over the theater and later her mother worked as an aide in the government health clinic. It was right next to the old Catholic church.”

Cruz convulsed his face in efforts to remember. “I recall that there was a church but that is all.”

Willie smiled. “Of course, there was at least one Catholic church in every city in Cuba back then.”

Cruz could only shrug. Willie glanced at the chessboard and then back at his opponent in the game of wits.

“Here’s something I’m sure you’ll remember. This lady told me the prison is on a hill not far from the beach.”

Cruz nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, it is.”

“And she said the girls used to go to the beach in their bikinis and they would wave and wiggle at the men they could see through the barred windows. The men would whistle back.”

Cruz nodded and laughed. “Oh yes. They used to do that all the time.”

“That must have driven you men crazy.”

Cruz rolled his eyes. “Absolutely. They were very beautiful girls too. They would call to us and strike provocative poses. The idea was to drive us wild. They were terrible.”

“I can imagine.”

Cruz shook his head at the memories of frustration.

Willie leaned forward, elbows on the table, and he squinted at his adversary.

“It’s funny that you remember it that way. What the lady actually told me was that the men they waved to at the prison weren’t the prisoners, they were the guards in the watchtowers. The prisoners were behind walls. They couldn’t see the beach or be seen from there. The only people at the prison who could see the sand were the guards in the surveillance towers. The girls waved to them to taunt them because they’d all had relatives locked up one time or another and hated the guards. They called them cretins, savages, and worse. They questioned their manhood.”

Cruz had turned to stone, including his gray eyes. He didn’t move. Willie whispered at him.

“The name Norman Cruz appears in the list of political prisoners held over the years in San Sebastian. Yesterday I spoke to a woman there, a Mrs. Martinez, whose older brother is now dead, but who was once imprisoned there. She remembered her brother telling her of a prisoner named Norman Cruz who was killed many years ago. He died after trying to escape and being badly beaten by guards. Just as you said, he had no family. His parents were dead and he had no siblings. He was buried with no headstone in a potter’s field. There was no one to keep his memory alive. He was forgotten.”

The other man’s mouth was twitching at the comers. Behind his eyes desperate thoughts dodged one way and another, but still he didn’t move. Willie went on.

“You know so much about life in prison not because you were a political prisoner, but because you were a prison guard. You were not one of the heroes, you were one of the villains. Maybe you were one of the guards who beat Norman Cruz to death. When you arrived here you knew you could claim his identity and his standing as a hero. And you’ve used that to deceive Lydia Estevez in order to lay your hands on her money. You’re a fraud, a criminal, and possibly a murderer.”

Now Cruz placed his palms on the table and started to get up.

“Don’t move!” Willie ordered and his right hand fell to his belt. His handgun was holstered there beneath the flap of his shirt.

“You won’t shoot me,” Cruz muttered.

Willie gazed around the patio and then back. “I don’t need to shoot you. All I need to do is shout out, ‘This man was a guard in a Cuban political prison.’ Some of the men here might have been in such prisons. All of them have relatives or friends who were in them. Maybe some of those loved ones died there. What do you think they’ll do if I yell that? Do you think you’ll make it to the gate alive?”

Cruz — or whoever the man really was — looked around like a trapped animal. He was sweating now, frightened to his bones. He didn’t move.

Willie waved to Frankie Lagos, who was waiting just inside the gate with another officer. They came, quietly read the impostor his rights, and charged him with using a false identity to enter the country. Fraud charges might follow. Now the former prison guard really would be a prisoner. He gave Willie one last withering, bitter glance and they led him away.

Ursula and her family were generous with Willie. It had only taken him a day to ferret out the phony, but they paid for a week. Given the money they had saved, they still came out way ahead.

A few days later, Frankie Lagos contacted him to say the guy had been identified through an old former inmate at the prison. His real name was Garcia and he had, in fact, been a guard at the San Sebastian facility.

“A particularly nasty one at that,” Frankie said. “He’s locked up and the feds are looking at human-rights charges against him.”

A few weeks passed and one day Willie ran into Ursula at the park.

“How’s your mother?” he asked.

“She’s fine. She’s gotten over the brief romance without much grief. She said she had already started to dislike things about him.”

“Is that so?”

“She said he ate too slow and he would always make her sit with her back to the door. That bugged her.”