Comrades in Miami Read online

  Additional Praise for Comrades in Miami:

  “Latour writes about the island with an unmatched verisimilitude.”

  —Booklist

  “Latour’s fascinating book remains a thing of beauty.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Victoria Valiente may well be one of the most fascinating characters to appear in a crime novel in my memory.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Beautifully crafted from start to finish.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  Praise for Havana World Series:

  “An entertaining and suspenseful story … [Latour] has managed to capture the sights, sounds, smells, and rhythms of Havana in a way that is as much nostalgic as it is descriptive.”

  —Kevin Baxter, The Miami Herald

  “ ‘Master of Cuban Noir’ José Latour threads his way through a complicated heist in Havana World Series. … The duplicitous complexity that is intrinsic to any successful heist tale unfolds with satisfying rigor and the occasional shock.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “The complications Latour throws in are priceless. … Much of the appeal of Havana World Series lies in the likable assortment of upwardly mobile thieves who just want to come away with enough cash to establish a foothold in the Cuban lower middle class.”

  —The Washington Post

  “[Latour cooks] up a tale as dark, rich, and satisfying as a pot of extra-meaty carne guisado. … The intricately drawn cast of career criminals who spring from Latour’s rich imagination makes Havana so enjoyable, a sure thing for any fan of exotic noir.”

  —Tom Sinclair, Entertainment Weekly, A-

  “Cuba’s slickest thieves have been hired by Lanski’s enemies to make a bold and lasting statement about criminal monopolies. … Latour has written an evocative and compelling tale about a special place and time.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A wonderful piece of social history and a stylized tableau full of major crime figures and colorful small-time hoods who glide across the landscape of Havana’s nightlife … The plot is intricate. … Small human dramas are imbedded within the larger flow of the story. … The characters are fascinating, the story compelling. … You couldn’t ask for more.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “A caper that deliciously blends baseball, American mobsters, corrupt cops, and pre-Revolution tensions into one combustible concoction … It is Latour’s elegant and unencumbered prose that carries the narrative. With a subtle, restrained quality, the author creates far more atmosphere in his calm-before-the-storm Cuba than most of the genre’s flashier offerings often afford.”

  —Tatiana Siegel, The Providence Journal

  “Latour writes beautifully in prose that’s lean and lucid and never overwhelmed by noir ‘style.’ An additional bonus is his perceptive depiction to the late-fifties Cuba.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A lively, entertaining read … [Havana World Series] pits Cuban crooks against an American crime boss in bustling, pre-Communist Havana.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Documentary-like narrative that combines the gritty fatalism of Bob Le Flambeur and the meticulous detail of Ocean’s Eleven … The portraits of Lansky, Bonanno, and other gangsters are full-bodied, but it’s the fictional blue-collar crooks, led by mastermind Ox Contreras, who give the novel its appeal and afford the best view of Cuban life.”

  —Booklist

  COMRADES IN MIAMI

  Also by the author

  Outcast

  Havana Best Friends

  Havana World Series

  COMRADES IN MIAMI

  José Latour

  Copyright © 2005 by José Latour

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Latour, José, 1940-

  Comrades in Miami / José Latour.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4674-9

  1. Cuban Americans—Fiction. 2. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9240.9.L38C66 2005

  813′.54—dc22

  2005045989

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  This novel is for Peter and Sheila, greatest of friends. And for Brian and Amy, John and Jeanne, and Ron and Carol.

  PART ONE

  One

  One of Cuba’s well-kept secrets is that for several years the most respected individual in the General Directorate of Intelligence was Colonel Victoria Valiente, a psychologist.

  Brigadier-general Edmundo Lastra (cryptonym Gabriel) was general director, Colonel Enrique Morera (Bernardo) was his deputy, but the woman who headed the Miami desk of the USA Department had won the admiration of superiors and subordinates alike with her long list of remarkable results. Under her guidance, the desk had submitted reports, issued warnings, and given forecasts judged extremely valuable by the country’s top leadership. She had achieved this by planting new, well-trained secret agents in the Greater Miami area, activating sleepers, approving the recruitment of valuable informers, opposing the enlistment of some who turned out to be FBI informers, exhaustively scanning public sources, and making educated and usually correct guesses.

  Known in the island’s intelligence community by the cryptonym Micaela, Victoria was transferred to Interior’s General Directorate of Intelligence from the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in late 1989, in the wake of the drug smuggling scandal involving corrupt Cuban intelligence and military officers. On July 12 of that year, the world learned that four perpetrators had been executed by firing squads.

  In 1983, Victoria had joined the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces’ Military Counterintelligence Directorate following graduation from the University of Havana’s faculty of psychology. At the time, she had seen such tools of the trade as telephone listening devices, minicameras, and tap detectors only in movies. She was ignorant of basic cryptology, had fired a pistol twice in her life, and abhorred judo, karate, and other forms of unarmed combat. She had never traveled abroad.

  Physically, Victoria was one shade below nondescript. As a child, one of her teachers in grade school had quipped that the girl’s mother poured the baby and raised the afterbirth. What seemed strange to her parents and teachers alike was that Victoria obtained good marks in exams despite the fact that the asthmatic and astigmatic girl rarely read textbooks.

  Even though her appearance improved notably during puberty, Victoria stood a meager five-foot-two, never weighed more than 112 pounds, had a rather homely face, and wore her mousy brown hair in bunches. The glasses needed to correct her astigmatism made her green eyes expressionless, and her figure was more angular than ro
unded where it counts. Neither dirty old men nor young virgin males ogled her when she sunbathed on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit.

  Perhaps for that reason, from a sexual standpoint, Victoria’s life had been saintly. She lost her virginity at twenty-one, and by the time she got married eleven years later she had copulated with just three men. Contrary to popular myth, this most unassuming, unattractive late-bloomer frequently experienced three orgasms in half an hour and, ten years into her marriage, enticed her husband into having intercourse two or three times a week, four if he felt like it. Lacking motivation for giving birth or a feeling of suitability for motherhood, she had popped contraceptive pills for seventeen consecutive years.

  Her remarkable sexual appetite was not Ms. Valiente’s most admirable quality, though. She possessed vast amounts of three others: One was brainpower.

  An admirer and disciple of British psychologist Raymond B. Cattell, she had read seventeen of his forty-one books and many of his articles. Cattell was the first to postulate that the key problem in personality psychology was the prediction of behavior. He classified traits into three categories: dynamic (those that set an individual into action to accomplish a goal), ability (concerning the individual’s effectiveness to reach a goal), and temperament (aspects like dispositions, moods, and emotions). After her transfer to Interior’s General Directorate of Intelligence, Division of Personnel, Evaluation Department, Victoria developed her theory of how to perform a prospective spy’s remote psychological profiling based on Cattell’s teachings.

  She studied the files of candidates submitted by field officers, rejected many, and asked for additional information about those who seemed to have latent possibilities. Then she eliminated a few more, recommended which operatives should approach each of the chosen few, and wrote scripts. With a good nose for politics, Victoria followed world events on a daily basis to choose the ones that, if reminded of a prospective or active informer, may strengthen his or her resolve to betray their government, institution, or company. She preferred the recruitment to be based on ideological affinity, but would set her scruples aside if blackmail or sex would let the cat out of the bag. In strapped Cuba, buying information was a means of last resort.

  During her four years in Evaluation, Victoria profiled many possible informers: people working for MI6, the Vatican, DGSE, SISDE, FIS, the Federal Security Service, three different United Nations agencies, the European Commission, the German and Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs, the Mexican presidency, Amnesty International, Roche, and Aventis. All the while, she devoured books on espionage. The lieutenant in charge of Intelligence’s library was absolutely flabbergasted and eventually compiled a list: In four years Victoria read 132 books, including all the classics. She was always the first to read new titles.

  Eventually her judgment was highly respected and her recommendations rarely questioned. But it had not always been like that. In the early nineties, her superior officer could not believe she was serious when she argued for taking a promising candidate to Disney World to ask him to work for Cuban Intelligence there and then. On another occasion, she suggested recruiting a pious, sixty-six-year-old priest as he listened to the handler’s confession. In both instances the officer, now retired, had asked her to convince him. She did it dispassionately, using her remote psychological profiling. She was so convincing that the two plans were approved. And they worked.

  In 1993, a few weeks after she had astonished everyone by choreographing the recruitment of a top European scientist who agreed to pass on the results of his firm’s research on an AIDS vaccine, Victoria was ordered to report to a third-floor office of the State Council at 10:00 A.M., where she was asked to take the Mega Society’s IQ test.

  This was quite surprising to her because, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, communist parties in power presented a rather simplistic and homogeneous official front when it came to politics, economics, sociology, and psychology. Non–Marxist-Leninist theories in the fields of social evolution and human responses were dead wrong. Dialectic materialism provided the only key that unlocked the complex behavior of individuals and societies. Having studied in the years when intelligence quotient tests were shunned as capitalist hocus-pocus, Victoria had scant knowledge about them and had never taken one.

  In practice, however, having realized that this sort of prejudice rendered useless important research and knowledge, from the sixties on almost all general secretaries of communist parties had appointed a couple of their most trusted henchmen to head small, specialized units that applied techniques such as standardized tests to measure intelligence.

  On her first attempt, Victoria Valiente gave forty-two right answers. According to Hoeflin’s fifth norming of the Mega Test, she scored 176. In common parlance this meant that out of half a million people, only one had Victoria’s high level of intelligence, emotional stability, and physical coordination.

  The old man who had asked that the test be taken—simply called Chief or Commander by the members of his inner circle, Commander in Chief in public, Godfather behind his back, Comedian in Chief in Miami, and Holy Father by an abjectly submissive historian—sat back in his executive chair to ponder Victoria’s results. On one hand, it was disappointing to find out that a semi-literate carpenter and a dressmaker had presented the world with a supergenius, whereas none of his children had scored above 130. On the other, looking on the bright side of things, he found comfort in the fact that among the incompetent, groveling, mealy-mouthed bastards that surrounded him, there was an individual scientifically proven to be extremely bright.

  The Chief was further seduced when he began reading her secret personnel file. Born on January 1, 1959, her parents had named her Victoria because, on that day, dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba. The revolutionaries proclaimed it Victory Day. Her father’s surname was Valiente, so her full name, both in Spanish and in English, literally meant Valiant Victory, and figuratively, Gallant Victory. Without meeting her personally, he had Victoria promoted to lieutenant colonel and transferred to the Miami desk.

  In her new position, General Lastra disregarded Victoria’s objections twice. Colonel Morera overruled her on four occasions. The consequences were catastrophic. Three of those six recruits turned out to be double agents, two of whom managed to infiltrate a twelve-person network in Miami that the FBI, after a three-year stint, dismantled in 1998. On the evening he learned of the debacle from his minister of the interior, the Chief had Lastra and Morera summoned to his office.

  “Did Micaela approve the recruitment of those sons of bitches?” he had yelled, apoplectic with rage, when told who the FBI agents were.

  Looking at their well-polished boots, the general and the colonel had shaken their heads.

  “I knew it!” the Chief growled triumphantly.

  In the adjoining anteroom an overzealous aide, upon hearing his idol rant and dreading that he may suffer a stroke or a heart attack, had the physician on duty come up. After hurried whispering, the physician knocked and entered the Olympus to take Zeus’s blood pressure.

  “Get out of here!” the patient had thundered, arm rigidly pointing to the door, the instant he saw the newly arrived. The doctor paled, did a quick about-face, and closed the door behind him. A pregnant, six-minute pause followed as Number One hobbled around the room. Lastra and Morera kept their gazes on the floor. Finally the Chief came to a halt in front of the officers, giving them the eye.

  “Look at me!”

  His face flamed; his gray beard shook with ire.

  “Whatever Micaela recommends, even if it is against your better judgment, you do it. You’ve made great sacrifices for the Revolution; I don’t want to send you into early retirement. But if you overrule Micaela again, you are finished. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Commander in Chief,” the culprits had chorused.

  “Okay, let’s see now what we can do for our comrades.”

  Victoria never learned that she had been given carte blanche, but the
subtle signs that she began picking up several days after taking the IQ test—whose results were kept from her—repeated themselves in late 1998: embarrassed smiles, lowered eyes, heightened consideration for her opinions and recommendations. Clearly remembering that she had opposed the recruitment of the two FBI informers, she guessed that a big shot, maybe the minister, maybe the Commander himself, had read her reports. Paradoxically, what was a disaster for the Directorate became a feather in her cap. It was not taxing at all to pretend that she had felt sad for the jailed comrades when in fact she was exulting over her personal triumph.

  The second trait that Victoria Valiente possessed in a prodigious amount was the acting capability of a universally acclaimed theatrical performer.

  Like many Cubans born, raised, and educated throughout the revolutionary era, right up into the late eighties Victoria had been a true believer. She had completed her secondary education in one of seven military schools run by the armed forces—the Camilo Cienfuegos schools—where the emphases placed on the perfection of communism and on the genius of the Chief were even greater than in civilian schools. Over the years, though, as she became privy to secret information of every nature, took English and French classes, read all sorts of magazines and newspapers, paid attention to her husband’s increasingly frequent criticisms, and, from 1998 on, devoted four hours a day on average to browsing the Internet, Victoria reached the inescapable truth that communism was doomed, in Cuba and anywhere else where it had gained a foothold.

  But Victoria had witnessed how the careers of many promising young people had ended abruptly because they had made the mistake of openly expressing disagreement. From the very first day that guilt gnawed at her conscience for doubting the veracity of her juvenile ideals, Victoria knew that she ought to conceal her incertitude and pretend that with each passing day she believed more and more in the Revolution and its Commander in Chief.