At first the city seemed to him a sprawl of huge, block-like apartment buildings with an occasional blast from the past like an aging Spanish hacienda, some with wash on the line and people watching out the window. Many were smoking. Kids played in the potholed streets, and old men sat on barrels over games of checkers. They passed a series of buildings painted Pepto-Bismol pink. Nick’s stomach was roiling and not from being rattled on this bus. He could use some of that stuff right now, but what couldn’t they use? He’d quietly left one of his smallest bills, fifty dollars, in Carlita’s money jar. He was nervous about flashing big bills—would stores even have change?—to get underwear and a change of clothes for everyone.
Claire poked him in the ribs. At least she had the brains not to say anything. Their Spanish might be sketchy, but they could both translate the words on the huge mural with Fidel Castro’s bearded profile they were passing: Solcialismo o muerta. In other words, Socialism or death. Somehow, that threat was the least of their worries right now.
But when they looked out the other side of the bus, it was pure beauty. They were driving along what Gina called the Malecon, a gorgeous avenue with a seawall and the glittering water just below. People were strolling or just hanging out. He spotted some who must be tourists.
“Caramba! There, there!” Gina said, bending low to look ahead of them. She pointed at a huge, turreted building, blinding white in the sun on an elevated area overlooking the city and the green-and-violet sea beyond. “The Hotel Nacional de Cuba,” she told them, then repeated it to Bronco and Nita, who were sitting behind her. Jace was across the aisle, sitting next to a man who was bringing sunglasses into the city to hawk on the streets. “Later,” she told Nick. “We will go there later, not looking like this, yes?”
“Yes, okay,” Nick threw over his shoulder. He, Jace and Claire had decided that they would go with her tourists-to-the-hotel plan. But first they were going into the heart of the city to the university area.
“Next stop,” she said. “Here, we get out here.” She shouted “Chofe!” to the bus driver over the noise and got up to lead them to the exit. Nick hefted Lexi, and they straggled out into an area where ficus trees lined the avenues and some lovely old buildings cast sharp shadows.
“This way,” Gina said, starting out with Heck at her side. Nick reminded himself he had to tell him not to answer every question Gina asked, despite her charms. They’d been talking about life in the US most of the way here.
His legs were stiff after sitting tense for so long. Gina turned away from the vista ahead with large homes and the huge main university building beyond, leading them toward a run-down-looking place that must have once been beautiful.
Heck turned back to tell them, “Gina says she can take me later to see the small hotel and hacienda my grandfather owned. She said not to get my hopes up that they look like my family said.”
Which, Nick saw, was the name of the game in this area where Gina lived, in what he would call student housing—cheap student housing. Her building must have once been grand but it was falling apart. The broken back gate they went in took them past a long-empty swimming pool with a broken diving board. They had to duck around tropical plants, no doubt once tended, now run rampant like a jungle. They walked in on the ground floor and followed her up three flights of dusty, partly crumbling stairs.
Jace carried Lexi now. She was always clinging to one of them, and Nick could see why. If he was nerved up and Claire looked it too, what must this child be thinking?
“This the old servants’ stairs,” Gina told them. “Wider ones in front, but we not need to see people if they not on canvas.”
“Campus,” Heck corrected her. “You said to tell you if you use a wrong word.”
“Campus, campus,” Gina recited. “I was even thinking for one momentito it might be circus.”
Claire said, “But your English is quite good.”
“I learn most of it from my Russian professor of anatomy couple years ago. English from a Russian, a good joke, yes?”
Nick saw Claire nod. He knew she was relieved to hear the explanation for the girl’s unusual accent. Like him, Claire’s brain had been running wild with suspicions about Russian spies and Cubans following them. That was ridiculous, of course, at least so far, but she had good instincts and she’d whispered to him more than once on the bus that the back of her neck was prickling with her woman’s intuition that they were being watched. He’d just forced a smile and shook his head at her. Of course they were being watched, but just because they stood out on the rural bus.
“No one should be here in my apartment, so no worry,” Gina assured them again as she had when she’d laid out her plan last night at her parents’ house. “My two girlfriends busy with their—their admirers, and Eduardo, he is away until late tomorrow, so you be gone by then, be taken care of.”
Claire’s stare collided with Nick’s. There were two ways to interpret what Gina had just said. But, right now, they had no choice but to trust her.
* * *
Claire nearly collapsed onto the sunken settee in the main room of the apartment Gina shared with two other women and one man. The antique piece was covered with faded and worn red velvet, probably a survivor of the good old days. A few other dark wood furniture pieces looked patched together from somewhere grand, a ball-footed table and five mismatched chairs, a cubbyhole desk that boasted a laptop. Heck hovered over that as if it was a magnet.
“Berto,” Gina said, “I tell you, it only go to university sites unless Eduardo connects to the wires we have to string outside, along rooftops. Under that pillowcase, our telemundo.” She pointed. “But unless he left the packet for the week here, sorry, but little Meggie can’t watch old TV shows today.”
“The packet?” Heck said.
“We pool some money, he take our hard drive to a secret location and get it loaded with mostly American TV. We see game shows, watch things like Homeland, about spies and secret agents, so don’t think we don’t know American things. I told you, I love America.
“Okay, now,” she went on, shrugging off her backpack and disappearing into one of the three doors that must lead to sleeping quarters—and, hopefully, a bathroom. “Here some suitcases you can use, look like you flew into Havana.”
She dragged out three, two of which looked presentable, despite their scuffed surface and small size. “You have to pretend they are heavy—tourists always come and go with heavy ones—but you won’t have much in them. How about I take Lorena and Berto, and we try buy a change of clothes for all of you, then you try look like European or Canadian or something.”
“Or something is right,” Bronco spoke up, though he hadn’t been saying much.
“Berto,” Nick said with a stare at Heck, “we’ll all go out later to see your family’s places, so keep to business now, okay?”
“Oh, sure, boss. I waited my whole life to see those places, wishing I could get them back, so I can stand it a little longer.”
Nick gave Heck two fifty-dollar bills he’d taken out from his plastic money belt this morning and had stuck in the front pocket of his pants. Gina’s eyes widened when she saw them. “Oh, I hope they have money give us back. Maybe we best go into a real shop, not somewhere on the street. We’ll bring back food too, not be gone long. You want nap, is okay to use my friends’ beds. Jenna looking like she can sleep right there,” she said with a nod at Claire. “So—you not answer the door. This plan, it will work. If it does, you think your friends who come get you in a boat will mind one more person? It would kill my parents