Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3) Read online

  “She’s in the same development as me,” Megan said. “Some snowbird who wanted his place watched for the summer. Free rent.”

  “You arranged this?”

  “She did,” Megan said. “She found it online. She was going to talk to you. She just wanted to try it out for a while. Nobody knew that you’d be home so soon.”

  “I’m about to be gone again. I’m going back to Coral Gables to find Roberto’s remaining uncle.”

  “What are you going to do when you find him?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “That depends on how cooperative he is.”

  *

  Javier Pimentel’s house in Coral Gables was in one of those gated enclaves where the guards would wave you in so long as you drove a nice enough car and you smiled like you belonged there. I had run the Beemer through a car wash and it sparkled in the noontime sun, and I happened to be dressed in one of my WASP outfits: a navy polo shirt that so far Megan Rumsford hadn’t slept in, and rust-colored pants that Barbara had found in a second-hand store in new condition. If you didn’t mind wearing the clothes of deceased people, the thrift store pickings in Florida were without equal.

  I had thought about stopping to see Gustavo, but I really wanted to grill his brother-in-law first, if I could find him. After that I would head to the hospital to see if they would release Gustavo and I could bring him back to my place to join in the fray. I was thinking that I might rent a hospital-type bed and put him in what used to be Royal’s room. I was still reeling from the fact that my son was gone and I hadn’t been given any notice. I hadn’t received a single call or text from Barbara, and even if I had, I wasn’t in a mood to answer.

  I did receive a text from Rose DiNapoli, just as I was turning onto Javier’s street: Thank you, kind sir, for rescuing me.

  You feeling OK? I sent back, after pulling to the side of the road.

  I guess so.

  You really ought to go see somebody, I wrote.

  Two minutes later, as I pulled up in front of Javier Pimentel’s driveway, I received a reply: Stop nagging me and I might.

  Off to visit Javier P, I wrote. Will call you afterward, OK?

  OK, she replied. Watch your back.

  The Pimentel spread had its own private gate within the gated community. I stopped and lowered the window. There was a call button under a speaker, and I pushed it.

  “Yes?” a female voice responded in accented English.

  “Vince Tanzi,” I said. “I’m here to see Javier.”

  “Momentito,” the voice said. Thirty seconds later, she said, “So sorry señor. Mr. Pimentel is no here.”

  “Tell him that this is about the sixty million that he owes Pescador,” I said, and I waited.

  Miraculously, the gate swung open.

  *

  If Javier Pimentel’s Coral Gables office was over the top, his house might have offended the sensibilities of Louis XIV. Stone gargoyles adorned the roofline, and the entrance walkway wound around a green marble fountain that could have accommodated the entire FSU water polo team. Gurgling mosaic crocodiles spewed fresh water into the bowls, which also featured cast bronze mermaids, evenly spaced between the crocs. Watch out girls—you could lose a finger to one of those things.

  A dark-skinned woman met me at the door with her hair wrapped in a black do-rag. “You can come in,” she said, heaving a sigh as if she’d been letting people through all day. I was shown into a two-story entrance hall with bamboo side tables along the ochre-painted walls and a round black leather settee in the center that matched the black velvet drapes. The decorating scheme could be described as Gothic Revival, or perhaps Early Halloween. I took a seat and waited until Javier Pimentel came around the corner.

  “Vince,” he said, extending his hand. “Nice to see you again.”

  “You may want to reserve judgment on that,” I said.

  “Come with me. Something to drink?”

  “No,” I said. “But you go ahead.” And you’d better enjoy it, because if you don’t come clean you’re going to be drinking out of a sippy cup, like your brother-in-law in the hospital.

  Javier led me to a parlor adorned with portraits on the walls, dark mahogany side tables, an old Victrola phonograph, and Persian rugs. I sat on a fainting couch, across from the chair that my host had taken. I pointed to one of the portraits. “Is that your father?”

  “That’s Raimundo,” he said. “The old son-of-a-bitch, captured for posterity.”

  “You didn’t get along?”

  “We had to get along, because we worked together.” Javier had swapped out the gold loop earrings that he had worn the other time I’d met him for a pair of simple diamond studs. “My father referred to me as the maricón. I won’t miss that part. He was an old-school homophobe.”

  “Who’s the woman?” I gestured to another life-sized portrait across the room from Raimundo’s.

  “My mother,” Javier said. “She passed away ten years ago. Maria Marta. We called her Mamarta.”

  “Like your boat?”

  He gave me an appraising look. “How do you know so much about us?”

  “It’s my job. I’m here to ask you some questions, and I don’t want any bullshit. Clear?”

  “I’m on your side, Vince. I want to find Lilian just as much as you do. Maybe more.”

  I saw a hint of fear in the expression on his round face. That was good—I can work with people who are already scared.

  “Let’s start with the money,” I said. “How much was in the box that you dropped off on Sunday?”

  “Box?”

  “Off of your boat. It was picked up by a Cuban Navy ship.”

  “What? Who do you work for?”

  “Myself,” I said. “Answer the question.”

  “Six million,” he said. “A loan repayment, that’s all.”

  “In hundreds? You’re kidding me. That kind of money gets sent directly from bank to bank.”

  “They want dollars in Cuba,” he said. “People are hoarding them. When the Castros are gone, everybody’s going to want U.S. currency. The peso is no good.”

  “So your lender marks them up and sells them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you get a markup on this side, because you’re laundering somebody’s money, so you buy at a discount.”

  “No comment,” he said. “You wearing a wire?”

  “I’m not a cop, Javier,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  He winked. “Let’s just say I won’t do anything for less than twenty points.”

  Twenty percent? Twenty percent of six million dollars was one-point-two million. Not a bad day’s fishing.

  “So this was ransom money? For Lilian?”

  Javier shook his head. “That’s something else,” he said. “This was for Segundo. He got the money together before he got killed, and I had to drop it off or they’d kill me, too.”

  “But six million isn’t sixty million,” I said.

  “Sixty million?” he said. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  I looked directly at him and said nothing. The Eyeball Test. He didn’t quite fail, but it was a D-minus at best.

  “Pescador told me about the sixty million when I was in her office.”

  “You went to Cuba?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She asked me to tell you that you were a Palestinian, and that if you screw around with her, she’ll kill you.”

  “You mean a palestino?”

  “Not the same thing?”

  “It means peasant,” he said, “which is ridiculous. It’s a socialist country. Everybody’s supposed to be a peasant there, but they still use it as an insult.”

  “If everybody’s supposed to be a peasant, why is the finance minister collecting six million in cash?”

  “Backgammon,” Javier said. “It’s not a game, it’s a curse. You play?”

  “No.”

  “Segundo thought he was unbeatable. Lilian could beat him, but she quit
a long time ago. Before she stopped talking to us. You get to be a big-shot gambler like Segundo, and you make stupid bets. Your ego takes over, and you make mistakes. Segundo got the crap beat out of him, and he owed her six mil.”

  “He owed Pescador?”

  “The money was my father’s emergency stash,” Javier said. “Segundo took it out of the safe, after Raimundo was killed. Some of it goes back years.”

  “He bet six million dollars? You said it was a loan.”

  “We owe her money,” Javier said. “Other money. He was trying to reduce the debt, and it got worse. Segundo was a financial genius, but he had too big of an ego. He couldn’t stand being beaten by his own sister.”

  “You mean Lilian? Or Susanna?”

  “Neither,” Javier said. “I mean Pescador. Segundo gave her that name. He used to complain that she played backgammon like an old fisherman. Slow and smart.”

  “Maria Inés Calderón is your sister?”

  “Half-sister,” Javier said. “My mother had her when she was fifteen, and they put her up for adoption. It was a vergüenza, a shameful thing. My half-sister used her adopted father’s surname—Calderón. In Spanish you use your mother’s surname as your second last name, but she dropped it when she repatriated to Cuba, for obvious reasons.”

  “Like what?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  Javier breathed a sigh. “My full name is Javier Pimentel Batista. My mother is the daughter of Fulgencio Batista. She grew up in Spain, when they were in exile. We are all his grandchildren.”

  Fulgencio Batista? He was the dictator who had turned Cuba into a police state back in the ‘50s, and by the time he was ousted by Castro he had killed tens of thousands, and had also emptied the state coffers. No wonder Roberto had told me that he couldn’t go to Cuba. Being a member of the Batista family would be like being named Mussolini.

  A large shadow passing through the hallway caught my eye. It was a human shadow, although it was the size of a Volkswagen. “Is somebody else here?” I asked Javier.

  “Just the housekeeper.”

  “Somebody bigger than that.”

  “Carajo,” Javier said. “I didn’t know they were back.”

  “You didn’t know who was back?”

  “Pepe and Lalo.”

  “I thought you said they didn’t work for you?”

  “They don’t,” he said. And if he had looked scared before, he looked terrified now.

  The two brothers entered the room, and the one with the braid looked at Javier. “What the fuck is he doin’ here?”

  “We were chatting,” Javier said. “He was just leaving.”

  “You got that right,” One-With-The-Braid said. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a Taser C2—the same one that they had already zapped me with, less than a week ago.

  Not again. Please.

  “How’s the insurance claim coming, Lalo?” I asked Braid.

  “I’m Pepe, not Lalo,” he said. “Lights out, motherfuck.”

  In the split second before the darts hit, I imagined myself in a saloon, drawing my Colt revolver with lightning speed after some bad hombre had pulled on me. Bang! He’d be dead on the floor, and I would blow the smoke from the barrel before slipping it back into the holster.

  But I had left my Glock in the car, and this time the bad guys won.

  *

  The smell is what woke me, not the light, because it was pitch dark. Whatever the Iturbe boys had injected me with this time hadn’t just made me drunk; it had knocked me out cold, and all I could feel was a bunch of sticks jabbing into my face. I tentatively put my hands around the rectangular object that was functioning as my pillow and determined what it was: a hay bale. I was in some kind of barn, although it had nothing like that nice, bucolic barn odor. It smelled like someone had died in here.

  My phone was gone, although my wallet was still in my back pocket. I remembered that I had left the cellphone in my car, in Javier Pimentel’s driveway. Fuzzy images began to filter back to me—being stuffed into the back of a silver Honda Fit, with the two gigantic goons taking up the front half of the tiny car. Being driven somewhere, while I gurgled and sang Beatles songs and the brothers took turns laughing at me and smacking me—I could feel the sore places on my face. Sometime before we had arrived at wherever I was I must have passed out for good. I got up off of a pile of what I imagined was loose straw and tried to make my way through the blackness around the perimeter of my cell. It was quite large—twenty feet by twenty feet, according to my pacing, and there wasn’t the faintest shred of light. If there was a window in here, it was boarded shut.

  I found the door and felt along the edges for the lock. There was a knob, but the door wouldn’t budge when I turned it, and I figured that there had to be a sliding deadbolt on the outside. With the right tools I might be able to rotate it and slide it out, but I had nothing with me except for my wallet and a whole lot of hay.

  I was going to be here until someone came to let me out.

  “Goddamn it,” I yelled in frustration.

  “Agua!” someone yelled back. “Dame agua, puta de mierda! There’s nothing left in this bottle!” It was a woman’s voice, and whoever it was, she was on the other side of one of the walls that surrounded me.

  “Who is that?” I yelled back. “Who’s there?”

  “Agua,” she said. “Please. I mean it, Pepe. Ten piedad.”

  “Lilian?”

  “What? Who’s there?”

  “Are you Lilian Arguelles?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “It’s Vince,” I said.

  “Oh—dear God,” she said, and I could hear her burst into sobs.

  “Everybody’s OK,” I yelled through the wall. “Roberto is OK. He’s at my place. Gustavo got beat up, but he’s going to be OK. Thank god I’ve finally found you.”

  “Oh Vince,” she said. “I have been waiting for so long. I gave up, really. I thought I was dead.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “Where the hell are we?”

  “We’re in a slaughterhouse,” she said. “It stinks, but you get used to it.”

  “What part of Cuba is this?” I asked her. “They put me under. I don’t remember the trip.”

  “You’re locked in too?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “They tasered me, and then they shot me up with something. I don’t remember much.”

  “We’re not in Cuba, Vince,” she said. “We’re in the middle of the ‘Glades somewhere. I’ve tried to find out where, but they won’t say.”

  “The Everglades?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Can you hear me OK?”

  “Pretty well,” I said.

  “Then get comfortable,” Lilian said. “You and I have some catching up to do.”

  FRIDAY

  I was wrong about my prison cell being sealed up from the light. It was now spilling into the building from over my head, and I took in my surroundings. I was inside a metal-walled holding pen, probably built to keep cattle in before they faced their demise. The walls reached up about nine feet, and then the building was open all the way to the corrugated metal roof. The morning sunlight was spilling in from above and from gaps between the wood slats that made up the siding. It was going to be a hot day outside, and the heat of the sun on the metal roof was making the stench of the place even less tolerable than before.

  Lilian and I had stayed up late into the night while I filled her in and she told me more about the Pimentel family. She had shunned them, except for Susanna, ever since her mother had died ten years ago, for which she blamed her brothers and her father. They were rich, arrogant, and crooked, and Lilian couldn’t take it any longer, so she and Gustavo had moved to Vero to get some distance. Gustavo still occasionally went fishing with Segundo at his camp on Blue Cypress Lake, and the family also went to Key Biscayne now and then to stay with Susanna, but that was all the family contact they had.


  I couldn’t see Lilian in the darkness while we had talked, but I had felt her bristle when I’d mentioned her half-sister. She’s the biggest capitalist pig of any of them, Lilian had said. It’s bitterly ironic that she calls herself a socialist.

  You don’t communicate with her?

  She’s the reason why I’m here, Lilian had said. This is about money. That’s all I know.

  So that meant that the Iturbes were not working for Javier Pimentel—he had been telling me the truth. They were now working for Maria Calderón, a future vice president of Cuba. The Iturbes were the enforcers—the debt collectors—who were making sure that Javier somehow came up with the sixty million that he owed his half-sister. And anyone who got in their way would be beaten up like Gustavo, and me, or maybe even killed, like Raimundo Pimentel and his second son.

  My face was sore from where the thugs had pummeled me, and all of my muscles ached from the few hours of sleep I’d had on the lumpy straw bed. There was a small stack of hay bales in the center of my room, and it dawned on me that if I piled them up I might be able to climb the partition wall high enough to see Lilian, who I presumed was still asleep, as it was dead silent in our shared, malodorous jail. My Vinny Shuffle had gotten far worse, and if I ever got back to civilization I would have to surrender myself to Megan Rumsford, who had better be wearing something other than my T-shirt when I next saw her.

  I stacked a column of bales four high, and used the remaining six to make a staircase. I was pleased with my ingenuity, and just hoped that the bales weren’t supposed to be what I had been given to eat. If I did get out of here, I would go find a roadside joint that sold draft beer by the bucket and fried oysters by the cubic yard, and I would have a little snack to celebrate staying alive. If.

  I managed to make it to the top of the hay bale staircase despite the weak leg, and I peered over the top of the wall.

  Lilian was gone. And her door had been left open to the outside.

  Now, all that I had to do was to swing the weak leg up and climb over the wall, and then drop nine feet to the floor. Hello, concussion. There was no way that I could do that. But there was the open door, with the light spilling in, and somewhere outside of that door there was a big plate of oysters and curly fries with my name on it.