Havana Best Friends Read Online Free PDF

it to me,” she said. “What will we do with him?”
    “Do with him?”
    “You said we should expect trouble from him.”
    “Sure. But is there something we can do?”
    Marina considered it. “Forget it.”
    “Fine.”
    Sean seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. Then he raised his eyes to the hotel’s top floors. “I’ll rest my arm on your shoulders now, you circle my waist. Let’s go and have a nightcap.”
    They sauntered back to the terrace and plopped down on a sofa. Sean ordered a Black Label on the rocks; Marina remained faithful to the local taste by ordering a mojito. Forty or fifty people relaxed on couches and armchairs, laughed at jokes, seemed to be enjoying themselves. Once their drinks arrived and they had taken a sip, a tall, overweight man sitting alone to their left pulled himself up and marched to the restroom.
    “Excuse me, honey, I’ve got to take a leak,” Sean said.
    Marina wanted to say “Me too” but decided to wait until he returned.
    Sean unzipped in front of the urinal next to the one in which the tall, overweight man was relieving himself. He made sure the attendant standing by the door was out of earshot. “The short,bald guy lives there. He speaks a little English and is a money-grabbing bastard on coke,” he said.
    Without so much as a nod, the tall, overweight man shook his penis, buttoned up, and washed his hands. The attendant handed him paper towels. Before leaving the restroom the man dropped a quarter into the dish for tips. Feeling expansive, Sean left a dollar.

    The following morning, at a quarter to nine, just as Marina and Sean boarded a DC-10 bound for Toronto, the tall, overweight man left the church of Santa Rita de Casia through the side entrance that faces 26th. He crossed the street and, holding his hands behind his back, head tilted backwards, stared at the ficus trees in the Parque de la Quinta. He appeared to be in his forties and had the powerful forearms and wrists of a dock worker. His brown eyes were lively, his thick moustache coffee-coloured, his lips full. After a few minutes circling the trees in awestruck contemplation, he slid behind the wheel of a black Hyundai and sped away.
    The gardener and the sweeper who tended the park became intrigued when the man repeated the same routine two days in a row. Their curiosity, however, was not stirred by his arriving before eight and going into the church the minute it opened its doors. Several Cuban Catholics did the same and, occasionally, curious visitors explored the interior of the small, modern church. Some diplomats and executives of foreign companies – accompanied by their wives and children – also attended Mass on Sundays. What was strange about the tall, overweight man was his fixation with the ficus. The park attendants were accustomedto seeing tourists stop by, but few returned, and those that did usually came back to show the mammoth trees to some other traveller. They wondered whether this guy was a botanist or an ecology freak.
    They would have been even more puzzled had they seen him in the church. He invariably sat in the same pew, one from where he could keep an eye on 26th, paid no attention to the service, didn’t kneel or pretend to pray. His behaviour had drawn the attention of an overly anti-communist layman who reported to the parish priest that a State Security official was using his church to stake someone out.
    On Tuesday, as he rounded the trunk of the ficus nearest to the bust of General Prado, the tall, overweight man spotted a short bald guy in a white
guayabera
leaving the apartment building that faced the park and darting down Third A toward 26th. His eyes still on the tree, the tall man strolled to the sidewalk and waited until his prey was within a couple of yards.
    “You speak English?” he asked with a pleasant smile.
    “Sure,” Pablo said, trying to look intelligent and knowledgeable. He had always envied huge men, and this bull-necked guy was at least