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nights. The fight at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the death of her father were long ago.
    She wore a yellow, flowered cotton dress, broken and thin from washing in a galvanized tub and drying on her casita’s clothesline. Her shoulders and forearms flexed hard and brown with the work, and she moved the hair out of her eyes with a breath. She was seventeen and beautiful to all men who knew her.
    The engine smells of the banana port rushed through the old windows with the blaring cow sounds of the tugs on the channel as the foreman came to her and clasped her upper arm, whispering into her ear in Spanish.
    She nodded and tore his hands away from her, but followed him along the creaking plank floors of Nuñez Y Oliva and back into a wood-paneled office thick with blue smoke breaking and disappearing from two black metal fans on Señor Oliva’s desk.
    Three men in black suits and ties, all young with pointed noses that smelled her as she entered, examined her knees and the back of her legs while she stood, head down, veiled hair closed as if she could make herself invisible.
    “Lucrezia, these men have come from Habana.”
    She understood.
    The foreman nodded to the men in agreement and left, whistling a low tune and jangling the operator’s keys in his hands. The men watched her for a while as she stood there, and one made an effort, rising from his chair, pulling the damp black hair away from her neck and brushing her nape with his fingers.
    She knew why they were here, and her hands shook as she felt her face flush from the heat.
    The two other men looked away and examined the smoke coming from their cigars.
    “¿Le conoce, General Gomez?” he asked. “You know him?”
    She bit her lip and hugged herself in the small room. On the walls hung old cracked photos of broken men with mules and tobacco leaves, and a serious man in a white suit who’d lived many years ago. He waited on a knee, presenting a smiling woman with a rose. There were words written in ink at the bottom of the photo, but they were scrawled and jumbled.
    The man, just a boy, grabbed the back of her neck and needled his fingers into the skin. “Le conoce y apuñaló un cuchillo en su corazón.”
    When he asked her about stabbing the general in the heart, she looked down at her old shoes. Bits of cured tobacco were caught in the laces. She just shook her head.
    The man screamed at her, his nails on her neck feeling like the feet of a rooster, and she knew what would come next. She held herself tighter.
    The two men laughed as he threw her against Oliva’s desk and pushed her face into the papers and cigar boxes, working his small hands up her legs, under her dress, and into the elastic of her underwear, which he pulled down to her knees.
    She turned to him. No longer breathing or scared but living the way a person does when trapped underwater without feeling or sound; and she stared into his black eyes, watching him as he unbuttoned his suit pants. She crooked her finger at him, bringing him into her dry with a smile, and the two men in black suits with him only laughed, their hats still in their hands, reclined in Oliva’s chairs and enjoying their smoke. And he soon shook and came on her dress, before she reached for his balls with her right hand and into his coat pocket with her left, brushing past a pocket watch ticking like a heart against her palm, and felt for a gun that she pulled out and fired into him twice and over his shoulder four more times into the smiling men before she darted through the window that brought in smells from the port. Exotic flowers and fruit and rust and chipped paint and sewage and places she’d never been and never believed she’d see.
    She knew they were only here for Gomez and they didn’t care about what she’d taken from the Boston Bar. And now they never would.
    Now Lucrezia had two reasons to run, and each one was as good as the other.

TWO
    BABY JOE DIEZ WIPED his face with a pink show hankie