Rachel is waiting for Jack in the shade of the synagogue, her bright blue dress standing out against the bright yellow walls. Everything on Curaçao seems bright, except for Jack's future if he can't outfox his pursuers. He flips himself over the fence and skids to a stop, startling her into a rapid protest in the local creole that he only half follows.
He presses his fingers to her lips. "I am in desperate need of a place to hide," he says in his best Papiamento, and hopes it hasn't come out "I have unnatural urges toward my parakeet."
Rachel looks dubious. He gives her his most unjustly betrayed look, and she relents and draws him with her toward a back door, which she bars behind her. Inside the footing feels odd, and he looks down to see white sand under his feet, as if they were standing out on the dunes.
He gives her a curious look.
"There was a time when we had to keep our footsteps quiet," she says. "It's a reminder."
It isn't easy to imagine her in hiding, the daughter of a wealthy man with five ships to his name and a warehouse full of interesting crates that Jack hasn't had a chance to investigate closely yet. All the same, he raises her fingers to his lips and kisses them, a salute to all the branches on both their family trees that have survived interesting times.
"I can be very quiet," he breathes against her cheek, and she laughs, a single breath against his ear.
*****
Rebecca's husband Jose watches out the airplane window the whole way to Curaçao, his spirits seeming to lift as they rise above the water. He's always been interested in machines, and she thinks he can't restrain his boyish enthusiasm for his first airplane flight no matter what the circumstances.
Rebecca keeps her gaze on her hands. She's too conscious of what she's left behind her in Cuba -- the bowl she used to make bread, most of her clothes, her books, her house, her friends. She imagines them in her kitchen without her, sharing out her things as she's told them they may as well do.
It's only when they're landing that he meets her eyes, as if trying to share some of his own relief. "We'll be among friends soon," he says.
They won't, she thinks. They'll be among strangers. Helpful strangers, who've gotten them out of Cuba and kept them from winding up in a labor camp for having opinions, but still strangers. She holds tight to his arm as they're helped off the plane, as they're given papers that declare them welcome on Curaçao.
When they climb into a car, she's not sure where they're going, but the couple in the front seat seem cheerful enough, the woman in clothes nicer than anything they've seen on Cuba in years, the man smoking cheap cigarettes. Jose asks about the make of the car, and he and the man have an incomprehensible discussion of carburetors.
The woman is pointing out one and then another of the brilliantly-painted buildings in Willemstad, and Rebecca pretends to listen.
"It's a fine old building," the woman says of a faded yellow synagogue. Rebecca wants to believe she'll come to love this place, but she's afraid she won't. The woman points to a shady corner. "And right there on that very spot is where one of my ancestors --"
"Sara," her husband says, shaking his head at her, although he's smiling.
"-- where," she says, shaking her head at him in return, "one of my great-great-great-grandmothers was seduced by a pirate."
Rebecca is startled into a laugh. "By a pirate ?"
"A real, live pirate," the woman says. "I don't know if he was a Jewish pirate --"
"I don't know if he was a real pirate," her husband says, as if he's heard this story too many times before.
"-- but I like to think he was."
Rebecca can't help smiling a little. It seems easier to start over somewhere where things like that happen.
"You'd make a good pirate," the woman's husband says fondly, and the woman smiles, her dark eyes flashing.
*****
Constanza refills the coffee of the man sitting in the booth by the window, and he barely nods to her over his paper. She can't help noticing he's not really reading the paper. He's watching people passing by instead. All right, so he's watching the girls in their bathing suits, or maybe the boys, that shouldn't make her twitchy.
She takes the coffee pot back up to the counter and starts refilling orange juice instead. Her boyfriend says she should get out of waitressing, but she likes it better than sitting behind a desk. Her boyfriend says she should get out of Miami Beach, but she likes it there, and anyway he's not Jewish and what would she say to her grandmama if she moved up to Tampa with him? It's not like her grandmama has to know if she goes on a date, but she can't exactly pretend she's not in Tampa.
Her mama says she should have gone to college, but what does she know about student loans? She never went to college, she came here from the islands with grandmama when she was a teenager and married a plumber. Constanza wouldn't mind finding a good plumber like her papa.
The man sitting in the window is more her grandpapa's age, and he has that same faraway look that her grandpapa got sometimes. He came to Florida from Israel, and to Israel from Poland before that, when he was just a boy. He was a plumber, too, and she remembers watching him work when she was little, his gnarled hands still strong.
Maybe she's just reminded because she can see the faded blue tattoo on the man's arm. Her grandpapa never talked about the war like her grandmama never talked about the revolution in Cuba, but she knows a lot about it anyway. It gave her bad dreams when she was little, but she's not a baby now.
A dark car pulls up outside, and two men in suits step out. They look official somehow, not tourist types at all. The man in the booth puts his newspaper down calmly and stands up. He offers her a folded bill. It's a hundred, not the five that he owes.
He leans in confidentially, with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes at all. "I'd greatly appreciate it if you told the gentlemen outside that I was never here," he murmurs. Then he slips out the back door, his abandoned plate cleaned but his coffee still nearly full.
When the men in dark suits show her pictures of the wanted criminal they're looking for, it's not the money that decides her; she isn't sure what does.
"No one like that came in here," she says, and eventually the men leave; after they've gone she wipes down the booth really well and throws away the man's newspaper.
She feels a little bad about it, but not all that bad, really.
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