Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,23
than go back to the orphanage. But how could she stay in Havana with no job and no money?
That’s when Luis, the sixtyish native habanero who was the desk clerk in her building, came to Gabriela’s rescue. “I know the man who owns La Europa,” he told her yesterday when she came home crying from her last audition. “Miguel, the owner, is a tough hombre, but he has a lot of connections. Everyone hangs out at his place—gamblers, gangsters, spies, rebels, gunrunners, drug smugglers, and even movie stars and presidents when they’re looking for something different. I’ll call and tell him you’ll be coming to see him tomorrow. Here’s the address.”
Movie stars and presidents had sounded good enough to Gabriela to make her overlook the scary part. She took the slip of paper with the address scribbled on it and said with a big smile, “Gracias, Luis. You’ve saved my life.”
Her first night as a chorus girl was a rite of passage. After the rehearsal in street clothes, Gabriela walked into the dressing room crowded with women in varying stages of undress. They scarcely looked at her, but Inez, the heavyset wardrobe lady, waddled over to her and surveyed her with a quick glance.
“Get undressed and put this on,” Inez said, grabbing a bright orange costume covered with sequins and feathers. She handed Gabriela a G-string, fishnet stockings, and a rhinestone-studded bra to wear under her gown. To compensate for Gabriela’s lack of height, Inez gave her a headdress that looked a mile high atop her upswept mass of dark curls and put lifts in her dance shoes.
Gabriela almost froze when she heard the danzón music start, but she quickly joined the chorus line and took a position upstage. The beat of the music was so infectious that she abandoned herself to it, losing all inhibition and sense of where she was, and moved with the same torrid flamboyance as the rest of the chorus line.
As the youngest girl working at La Europa as a regular, Gabriela grew accustomed to being treated like a little sister by the other dancers, but she did not have much in common with them. Most nights, after the show, Gabriela liked to sit at the bar before going home. She didn’t drink, but she enjoyed chatting with the bartender, Diego, a wiry young man in his twenties who was working his way through the University of Havana.
Diego provided a storehouse of information about the shady characters who frequented La Europa and the illegal activities they conducted hand in hand with local government officials, who grew rich from a cut of the profits. Gabriela listened, fascinated, as Diego spun dark tales of kickbacks, fraudulent government contracts, and the skimming of public funds. It was a pattern of corruption that fostered a whole underworld of cocaine peddlers, black market gunrunners, and gamblers who ran illicit cockfights and the daily bolita numbers racket. In hushed tones, the bartender also spoke of military strongmen who spied on rival political groups, often assassinating their leaders in the dead of night, and of revolutionaries who had infiltrated the army and were planning acts of sabotage.
It gave Gabriela goose bumps when she looked around the room and recognized the big shots and gangsters whose faces she had seen in the newspaper. Here they sat at tables in La Europa, smoking Montecristo cigars and drinking the mojitos and daiquiris that Diego had prepared.
“That’s Batista over there,” Diego told Gabriela one night, nodding toward the strikingly handsome man in a white linen suit who was seated in a roped-off section. Gabriela remembered her father telling her about Batista when Arturo was a stoker and Batista a brakeman for the United Fruit railway. “They teased him for being a pretty boy and called him ‘El Mulatto Lindo,’ ” Arturo had said, “but I thought he would grow up to be president some day.”
Her father had been right right. Batista used to be president, but then he retired to Florida to marry Marta Fernández Miranda, his beautiful young mistress—“so romantic,” Gabriela’s mother had said. But three years ago, Batista had come back to Cuba to become a senator.
True to form, Diego had inside information. “Batista really wants to be president again,” he told Gabriela, “but he might lose if he runs for election next year, so he’s got to get rid of President Prío before that. I bet that’s what he’s sitting there plotting with his aides right now.”