9. A COLD CIVIL WAR

T he message tone woke him. He reached for his phone in the dark, watched Volapuk scroll briefly past. Alejandro was outside, wanting in. It was ten after two in the morning. He sat up, pulled on his jeans, socks, sweater. Then his boots, whose laces he tied carefully: this was protocol.

It was cold in the hallway, as he locked his door behind him, less cold in the elevator. In the narrow, fluorescent-lit foyer below, he rapped once on the street door, heard his cousin’s three raps in reply, then one. When he opened the door, Alejandro stepped in, surrounded by a nimbus of colder air and the smell of whiskey. Tito closed and locked the door behind him.

“You were sleeping?”

“Yes,” Tito said, starting for the elevator.

“I went to Carlito,” Alejandro said, following Tito into the elevator. Tito pushed the button; the door closed. “Carlito and I have our own business.” Meaning separate from family business. “I asked him about your old man.” The door opened.

“Why did you do that?” Tito unlocked his door.

“Because I didn’t think you had taken me seriously.”

They entered the darkness of Tito’s room. He turned on the small shaded lamp attached to his MIDI keyboard. “Shall I make coffee? Tea?”

“Zavarka?”

“Bags.” Tito no longer made tea in the Russian way, though he did steep his tea bags in a cheap Chinese tchainik.

Alejandro seated himself on the foot of Tito’s mattress, knees drawn up before his face. “Carlito brews the zavarka. He takes it with a spoon of jam.” His teeth shone in the light from the MIDI lamp.

“What did he tell you?”

“Our grandfather was the understudy of Semenov,” Alejandro said. Tito turned on his hotplate and filled the kettle.

“Who was that?”

“Semenov was Castro’s first KGB advisor.”

Tito looked back at his cousin. This was something like hearing a fairy tale, though not an entirely unfamiliar one. And then the children met a flying horse, his mother would tell him. And then grandfather met Castro’s KGB advisor. He turned back to the hotplate.

“Grandfather was one of the less obvious participants in the formation of the Dirección General de Inteligencia.”

“Carlito told you that?”

“I knew it already. From Juana.”

Tito thought about this as he put the kettle to boil on the element. Their grandfather’s secrets could not have gone with him entirely. Legends grew like vines, through a family like theirs, and the midden of their shared history, however deep, was narrow, constrained by the need for secrecy. Juana, so long in charge of the production of required documents, would have enjoyed a certain overview. And Juana, Tito knew, was the deepest of them all, the calmest, most patient. He often visited her, here. She took him to El Siglo XX Supermarket to buy malanga and boniato. The sauces she prepared for these were of a potency he already found alien, but her empanadas made him feel as if he were blessed. She had never told him about this Semenov, but she had taught him other things. He glanced toward the vessel holding Ochun. “What did Carlito say, about the old man?”

Alejandro looked over his knees. “Carlito said there is a war in America.”

“A war?”

“A civil war.”

“There is no war in America.”

“When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?”

“That was the ‘cold war.’”

Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. “A cold civil war.”

Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun’s vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.

“You don’t follow politics, Tito.”

Tito thought of the voices on the Russian Network of America, drowning somehow, taking his Russian with them. “A little,” he said.

The kettle began to whistle. Tito took it off the element and dashed some boiling water into the tchainik. Then he added the two tea bags and poured the water with a habitual fast flourish. He put the lid on.

The way that Alejandro sat on his bed reminded Tito of crouching with his schoolmates, at dawn, to whip a wooden top from one cobble to the next, the day’s heat gathering in the street around them. They had worn pressed white shorts and red scarves. Did anyone spin tops, in America?

Leaving the tchainik to steep, he sat beside Alejandro on the mattress.

“Do you understand how our family came to be what it is, Tito?”

“It began with Grandfather, and the DGI.”

“He wasn’t there long. The KGB needed its own network in Havana.”

Tito nodded. “On Grandmother’s side, we had always been in Barrio de Colón. Juana says before Batista.”

“Carlito says that people in the government are looking for your old man.”

“What people?”

“Carlito says that it reminds him of Havana here now, of the years before the Russians left. Nothing now is business as usual. He tells me that this old man was instrumental in bringing us here. That was a big magic, cousin. Bigger than our grandfather could have worked alone.”

Tito suddenly remembered the smell of the English-language papers, in their mildewed case. “You told Carlito you thought it was dangerous?”

“Yes.”

Tito got up to pour two glasses of tea from the tchainik. “And he told you that our family is under an obligation?” He was guessing. He looked back at Alejandro.

“And that you were specifically requested.”

“Why?”

“You remind him of your grandfather. And of your father, who was working for this same old man when he died.”

Tito passed Alejandro a glass of tea.

“Gracias,” said Alejandro.

“De nada,” said Tito.

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