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The resort’s intimate dining room featured warm wooden floors, a high-pitched ceiling, and a wall of windows that offered a picturesque view of the pristine white beach—lined with tall, leaning palm trees—and beyond it the vast Atlantic Ocean. The room, which was maybe half full, held only twenty-five round tables, each with seating for four. They were nicely separated so that the guests—and their conversations—would not be on top of one another.
Amanda Law, wearing a simple but elegant linen dress and sandals and with her thick hair now unbraided, sat between Chad Nesbitt and Matt Payne, who looked almost like twins—Chad was a little shorter and stockier—both dressed in khaki slacks, cotton knit shirts, navy blazers, and deck shoes.
Matt had his stainless steel Colt .45 Officer’s Model tucked inside his waistband at his right hip.
“Even if you had broken bones, you’d be smiling, too,” Chad said, stirring his second Myers’s dark Jamaican rum and tonic cocktail. “Goodbye, Communism. Hello, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”
“And that happens all the time down here?” Amanda said as she delicately squeezed a slice of lime into her glass of club soda.
Chad shook his head. “There are far more quiet landings than a wild running aground like today. I heard someone today say it’s up to eight thousand people so far this year—and that’s just here, not counting coming up through Mexico. The Cubans are willing to do anything for freedom. You’ve heard of the wet-foot, dry-foot policy?”
Matt shook his head.
“What—” he began, then stopped as he saw the waiter approaching with a full round tray.
“If you’ll please pardon the interruption,” the waiter said, placing an enormous bowl before Amanda. “For the lady, our coconut lobster bisque to start.”
“That looks wonderful,” Amanda said. “Thank you.”
He put a plate in front of Chad and said, “The seafood seviche with crisp plantain chips.”
And then he put two plates in front of Matt, who was taking a sip of eighteen-year-old Macallan single malt whisky.
“Crab fritters, sir,” the waiter said. “And this, of course, is the tuna and oyster sashimi you called about earlier.”
Matt looked at the waiter and was about to ask a question when he saw another waiter coming toward them with an enormous round plate piled high with finely crushed ice, on top of which were two dozen oysters on the half shell. The waiter put it on the table at the empty place setting.
“Enjoy,” the second waiter said, then both left.
“Can anyone tell me,” Matt said, looking between Amanda and Chad, “whose brilliant idea it was to instruct servers to say, ‘Enjoy!’ Is that an order? The entire purpose of why we came is to enjoy the meal. It’s not like we need to be told to.”
“Want to explain why you’re about to enjoy two dozen raw oysters?” Amanda said. “And oyster sashimi?”
“I thought you knew, my love, that these mollusks have a special, shall we say, romantic effect,” Matt said, smiling as he held up one of the half shells with an oyster. “Please enjoy one . . . and by one I mean help yourself to a dozen, of course.”
“Really, Matt?” Chad said, shaking his head and grinning. “You’re absolutely shameless.”
“I think, Romeo, that you’ve already caused enough trouble being overly romantic,” Amanda said playfully, picking up her soup spoon. “And thanks to the condition you put me in, I have to be careful about not eating high-mercury fish. I really wanted some tuna.”
“Well, suit yourself,” Matt said, then put the half shell to his lips and slurped the oyster out. Hand on his chest as he chewed, he looked at Amanda with an exaggerated face of extreme gastronomical satisfaction. Then he swallowed, exchanged the empty shell for a full one, and looked at Chad. “What were you saying about that dry-wet policy?”
“Wet-foot, dry-foot,” Chad corrected, as he piled seviche on a plantain chip. “It’s U.S. immigration policy, unique to Cubans trying to come to America. If a Cuban national can step on U.S. soil, he or she can stay, and a year and a day later becomes nationalized. If, however, they get intercepted at sea—anywhere on the water, even if it’s a foot deep, that’s the ‘wet foot’—they get shipped back to the Castro Brothers’ Happy Havana. Which they just risked their lives to flee—maybe for the third or fourth time—because the Castros don’t exactly welcome them home with a brass band.”
Chad ate his seviche, and began piling more on another chip.
“And the cops try keeping them from reaching land?” Amanda said.
“As you saw, that can get almost comical, a real cat-and-mouse catch-me-if-you-can game. But they have to. Otherwise, if word got to the Cuban masses that everyone could just step ashore and begin enjoying the bounty of America, Florida would be flooded. I mean, c’mon, they’re not exactly rushing to Haiti, which is half the distance. It’d be worse than during the Mariel Boatlift. Remember that, Matt?”
“Yeah,” Matt said, after washing down another oyster, “when Castro let something like a hundred thousand leave in 1980. And it happened again in ’94. The luckier ones landed packed in boats barely able to float, carrying little more than their Eleguá.”
“‘Eleguá’?” Amanda parroted.
“The West African–Caribbean Santería god that they believe contro
ls their paths, their destiny. Eleguá is represented by a clay disc that’s the face of a child. Castro cleverly cleared out his jails and loony bins, forcing them onto the boats. The more desperate lucky ones used rafts smaller, and less seaworthy, than a bathtub. Little more than tire tubes and blocks of Styrofoam lashed together. God only knows how many did not survive the trip.”
Amanda considered that for a moment and, sadly shaking her head, said, “And you acquired this vast knowledge how?”
