Sofrito. Phillippe Diederich

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СКАЧАТЬ his bag. He placed half his cash in the room’s safe deposit box and spread the rest between the pages of his soft cover copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he had brought specifically for that purpose.

      It was Monday evening. His flight out was on Sunday morning. That gave him five full days to get the recipe. He had no time to waste. He tried Justo’s brother’s number again, but there was still no answer.

      The noise from the courtyard and the lobby filtered up to his room. It sounded like a party. He went downstairs and took inventory of the security guards in the lobby. They were big men in beige guayabera shirts. One was posted by the elevator, another at the stairs. Two stood by the hotel’s entrance and another near the patio bar where the trio was playing Guantanamera for what must have been the fifth time.

      It was dark out. At the entrance to the hotel, the doorman was flirting with the same three women Frank had seen earlier. They appeared to be old friends, but as Frank approached, the doorman quickly separated himself and greeted him with a formal nod.

      Frank’s gaze lingered on the pretty girl with the blue dress. In less than a second he took in the outline of her shoulders, her deep reddish skin and the arch of her back as it curved down her legs all the way to her magenta colored toenails.

      She noticed him looking and smiled, but one of her friends had already moved past her and was reaching for Frank’s arm. The doorman pulled her back.

      “Do you know the restaurant, El Ajillo?” Frank asked the doorman.

      “Cómo no, would you like a taxi, caballero?”

      “Oye,” the pretty girl in the blue dress said loud enough for him to hear. “Listen to him. He almost sounds Cuban.”

      “Ya, Marisol.” The doorman waved her away. Then he stepped outside and signaled a man who was sitting on the hood of a turi-taxi parked across the street.

      Marisol’s friend approached him again. “What’s your name, amigo?”

      “Frank.”

      “Español?”

      He shook his head. The girl glanced past him at the doorman who was making his way back into the hotel. “You want company tonight?”

      He had never been good with women. He was shy. In all his relationships, it had been the women who approached him. When he entered into a relationship, he hung onto it with mild apathy until it became obvious to both parties that love had never been part of the equation.

      The doorman came back and shooed the girl away. “Yoselin, por favor.”

      Frank stole a quick glance at Marisol, then walked out to the car.

      “Oye.” Marisol caught up with him as he reached the taxi. “You don’t like my friend?”

      “It’s not that—”

      “You don’t think she’s pretty?”

      Yoselin and the other girl were staring at them, waiting.

      “Everyone thinks she’s pretty.” Marisol crossed her arms. “Italians in particular.”

      There was something easy about her, like they’d been friends a long time ago. Frank leaned against the side of the taxi and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not Italian.”

      “¿Entonces?”

      “Americano.”

      “No me digas. Yoselin has cousins in Miami.”

      Frank smiled. He knew about jineteras, Cuba’s famous prostitutes. His first instinct was to walk away, but then he noticed every foreign man around the Sevilla had a pretty Cuban woman hanging on his arm. If he dined alone it might raise suspicion. And there was something else. He found her cockiness attractive. Challenging. Besides, she wasn’t trying to pick him up. She was trying to hook him up with her friend.

      But then she took his arm and said, “Why don’t you take me to El Ajillo with you? No one likes to eat alone.”

      In the street, people were going about their business, walking in and out of the hotel or simply waiting. In Cuba, that was what they did. Wait. What was happening between Marisol and him was just one moment in many. Yoselin and the other girl had gone back inside the Sevilla.

      She was quite beautiful. And it was just dinner. He met her eyes. There was something tender in them. His stomach quivered. He stepped aside and allowed her into the taxi.

      “El Ajillo?” the driver asked.

      “Yes. I’ve heard it’s pretty good, no?”

      “Señor,” the driver said with authority, “es el mejor. The best in the world. I can promise you, never in your life have you tasted such food.”

      Frank leaned back on the seat as the taxi left Prado behind and traveled down the Malecón, Havana’s seaside boulevard. Marisol sat with her face pressed against the window. She seemed sad, absorbed in her own problems, a dark world of lost nights. But he knew nothing of her life.

      “So.” He swallowed his fear. “Have you ever been there?”

      “Qué va, chico, and how would I pay for it?”

      Maybe it had been a mistake. He had misread her eyes. He had to be careful. She could be anybody.

      “But tell me,” she said, “how is it in Miami?”

      “I live in New York.”

      “I would love to go to Miami. They say it’s just like another Habana.”

      “Yeah.” Frank laughed. “You could say that.”

      She adjusted the thin dress strap that had slipped down her arm and turned back to the road. Frank watched her for a moment. Suddenly she seemed shy, distant. Perhaps it was all a game. Or business. Not all jineteras were professional prostitutes. Something about Marisol seemed tough and innocent at once. He wanted to pull her close, hear her story. But instead he turned away and watched the buildings race past on his left. Dim lights spilled out of open windows, all amber and green. Along the Malecón there were no billboards, no neon, no signs, no crowds, no drive-thrus. Havana was everything New York City was not: the traffic was light, the streets were dark, peaceful. People strolled without hurry. He rolled down the window and breathed in the salty ocean air spiced with refinery fumes and a thousand perfumes of flowers and women and cooking stoves and the life that was Havana. When he exhaled, he released all of New York City, all of Maduros and Pepe and Justo and Filomeno. The tropical night swallowed it whole without so much as a gasp.

      “Caballero,” the driver said, “I have the air conditioning for your comfort.”

      Frank caught his eyes through the rearview mirror. He could be an informant. A spy. He’d often heard taxi drivers were the eyes and ears of the Castro government.

      El Ajillo was a rustic open-air restaurant in the style of a bohío. It had a thatched roof and long wooden tables set under the canopy of a pair of thick almond trees strung with Christmas-style lights. The place was packed.

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