THE CASTRO GENE
Todd Buchholz
Oceanview Publishing
Thriller
ISBN-10:1933515066
ISBN-13: 978-1933515069

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• Author Interview -- May 18, 2007

PROLOGUE

november 22, 1963

Oriana screamed at her chauffeur. “Get me home! Get me home!”

The Bentley raced through the barren streets of Palm Springs, ripping through the dusty roads lined with date palms. Oriana rocked back and forth in the back seat of the car and wept into a silk scarf.

She ­hadn’t felt so lonely since packing her bags and fleeing the Havana Hilton in ’59. Back then, she ­didn’t even have a chance to kiss her lover good-bye. Too many bayonets waving in the streets, too many Americans targeted by the commandos of Fidel Castro.

But this was worse. Even before the Bentley finished braking in front of her estate, she sprung out of the vehicle, kicked off her Chanel heels, and ran. She flung open the doors, nearly knocked the Rodin off its pedestal in the foyer, and rushed to her television—the first color tele­vision in Palm Springs. As it warmed up she wondered how her careful plans ­could have been shredded so thoroughly.

The vacuum tube finally yielded a picture, and she saw a young reporter from Texas on CBS describing the gunshots that tore apart the president. And the country.

Oriana collapsed onto her sofa and sobbed. “It’s all wrong, it’s all wrong.”

But for the next forty-two years, through the Warren Commission, Watergate, and Whitewater, she kept quiet about what she knew.

CHAPTER 1

2005

Ten thousand boxing fans screamed for bloody murder, their panting and shouting shaking the molded plastic seats at the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.

“He’s dying out there!” shouted “Fight Doctor” Hank Robbins, a Philadelphia podiatrist who provided overheated commentary for HBO Sports. “Perez can hardly hold up his gloves. But will ya take a look at Braden! This twenty-four-year-old kid is snorting and charging like a young bull chasing a red cape.”

“The Braden boy shows stamina, but can he put Perez away?” replied Carl Mann, who’d already been sprayed with blood from Perez’s nose. “Lots of kids can hit hard, but it takes real skill to close the door on a fight.”

Lucas Braden was wondering the same thing. Did he have the killer instinct? Though he looked a hell of a lot better than Perez, after seven rounds his arms hurt, and his ten-ounce gloves felt as heavy as metal anvils. As he watched referee Dickie Mill check out Perez’s dilated pupils to ensure the half-Cuban/half-Puerto Rican middleweight ­could continue, Luke tried to take inventory of his own body. His left eye felt puffed up from an elbow smashing his face in the second round. Perez had a vicious right jab. With a swollen left eye, Luke worried that he ­wouldn’t see the jab coming. Legs? Numb. Luke had bounced and danced through round three, but after that his legs lost their spring. So much for jogging five miles and stair-stepping for an hour each day. All that sweat bought him just three rounds worth of stamina.

“Braden looks fresh!” the Sports Illustrated photographer yelled to his partner. With his floppy brown hair and wide blue-green eyes, Luke ­didn’t have the classic mug of a boxer. Though his nose had been smashed numerous times, somehow it ­didn’t look like the Kentucky Fried biscuit of most boxers. His neighbor, an el­derly Chinese herbalist, fed Luke shark-fin soup and shark cartilage. “For my joints?” he asked the old man. “No, so your nose bounce back.”

Luke heard the photographer’s “fresh” comment and almost smiled through his mouthpiece. The photographers did not know that he was on the verge of collapse. None of them had ever been in a ring. You don’t know the game—hell, you don’t know yourself—until you’ve felt a left hook crawl across your jaw, crushing skin cells, collapsing a chin artery, and chopping off the blood flow to the brain. You blink, without ­really knowing whether your eyes will open again. You smell your own sweat, nostrils flare as Mother Nature prepares you for a battle that most men left behind in the Neanderthal era. Your body reaches back to some frightening prehistoric yesteryear and prepares you for a battle to the death. Sure, the cornerman may throw in the towel after four rounds, but your DNA, your sperm count, your testosterone, your very essence do not believe in the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. You’re not facing off against another athlete. You’re fighting a saber-toothed tiger, a raging wild boar, a desperate, diseased hairy anthropod from one million b.c.

What the hell was he doing in the ring with these beasts?

“That ring was made for Dante not for a Braden,” his father had warned him three years earlier when Luke disclosed his plans to enter professional boxing. He ­didn’t know what his father was talking about, but that ­wasn’t surprising. A professor of En­glish literature at Columbia University, Dr. Francis Braden usually called up literary references when he scolded his son. The professor called his son a “Yahoo” so often during his childhood that Luke thought it was a sports team somewhere. Only later did he realize his father was comparing him to the smelly humanoids in Gulliver’s Travels. And so Luke fled the Upper West Side of New York City at the age of seventeen, right out of high school, and enrolled in the College of Pugilistic Arts, that is, Delancy’s Gym on West 28th Street.

Sure, he ­could have gone to college. No doubt some local college would have taken him with his C average. Every week Professor Braden would come home with brochures and applications—from schools no one had ever heard of—tucked deep into his leather briefcase embossed with the seal of Columbia University. The seal shows a woman seated on a throne, with the motto In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen, “In Thy Light Shall We See Light.” The light must have been blinding because his father ­couldn’t see Luke’s humiliation.

Luke was not dumb, but his father’s “tweedier-than-thou” manner drove him away from teachers. He liked high school math and, of course, gym class, but history, En­glish, and Spanish were for the pigeons in Central Park, not for young, horny boys.

Finally when his high school guidance counselor urged his father to put him on Ritalin, Luke exploded at both of them. “I don’t have A.D.D. I’ll tell you what I’ve got. I’ve got a case of being a normal seventeen-year-old boy. You know what that means? I just want to play sports and get laid.”

That’s the day Luke stuffed his clothes in a duffel bag, marched past his puzzled father, and took the subway to his new home, Delancy’s gym. At Delancy’s Gym he learned to box from an old white guy named Buck Roberts, who had earned his Golden Gloves championship back when Franklin Roosevelt was still a governor.

Taking one peek at the one-hundred-forty pound Luke, Buck told him to get a night job.

“Where?” Luke asked.

The old man with the broken nose picked up the cracked plastic telephone and called his buddy, a waiter at Smith & Wollensky’s steakhouse on Third Avenue. Two hours later Luke was unloading ribs and chops, and was invited to eat a pound of aged top sirloin ­every night. At first, he just got heavier, but within eight weeks, Buck’s weightlifting regimen turned the beef to beefcake. Luke started looking tougher, his punches backed by his prime ribs and powerful legs.

He ­didn’t make close friends at the gym. The guys he sparred with ­didn’t have fathers who taught at Columbia. Most of them ­couldn’t identify their fathers in a police lineup. Luke kept quiet about his family. Even told one guy that his parents and two imaginary sisters had been killed in a train derailment next to a slag heap in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The street toughs sweating in the boxing rings knew he ­wasn’t like them. His sparring partners, some of whom dealt drugs on the side, felt more comfortable with the drug lords from the country called Colombia than from a son of a professor in the university En­glish department on West 116th Street. Roberts even nicknamed Luke “the professor.”

Now as the bell rang for round eight, the twenty-four-year-old “professor” faced his most challenging test. Luke stared at the crowd and heard a loud thumping. It was his own heart. A group of Cuban-Americans sitting behind Perez’s corner were waving flags and shouting “Perez Ganara! Perez Ganara!” A gray-haired man stood up and pumped his fists to encourage the spectators in the rafters. Luke ­could read “Papa” on his T-shirt. Luke ­could not tell the color of Papa Perez’s shirt. Maybe being color blind was not such a bad thing for a boxer. The blood on the mat looked less vivid, rather greenish-gray, in fact.

None of Luke’s relatives made it to Atlantic City for the fight. Perhaps his father’s friends would read about it in the Sunday Times while enjoying brunch at Sarabeth’s.

Luke glanced back at his corner. Not even Buck Roberts had made it. His cardiologist had slammed him on a low-fat, low-salt, low-stress diet. No travel. No excitement. Not even ESPN. Instead, old Buck sent Henry Beetle, a skinny, spectacled black kid even younger than Luke, to work the corner stool. Henry was a boxing savant. He looked like the class nerd of P.S. 80 in Harlem, but ­could tell you that in June 1930 “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom knocked out Jimmy Slattery to nab the light heavyweight championship. He ­could tell you about Count Basie playing the Apollo in 1938, and he ­could curse you in Yiddish, Italian, and Cantonese. Most important, Henry knew how to stop a cut over the eye from bleeding into the socket.

“You got it, Prof!” Henry yelled. “It’s a lock! Three more rounds to go! Ahead on points. Just like Ali-Frazier I. Let’s keep scorin’ the points. The knockout will follow!”

Luke ­couldn’t hear Henry.

In a skybox suite high above the ring, protected from view by glass so dark that it would block even Clark Kent’s vision, Paul Tremont watched three televisions. Cufflinks flashing, he paced the suite with graceful strides. One of Tremont’s televisions showed the HBO broadcast of the fight. Another displayed a split-screen, closed-circuit camera aimed at Luke’s and Perez’s corners. A third television glittered with the Reuters financial trading screen, flashing red and green numbers representing Tokyo stocks and the foreign exchange action. The stylish, seventyish gent had wagered about half a billion dollars that the yen would fall against the U.S. dollar that evening. He also had bet $50,000 on Perez to win the bout against Braden.

Paul Tremont ignored the Reuters screen. Not only had he bet on Perez flattening Luke Braden, he was also channeling money to Perez’s aunts and uncles in Miami Beach to keep Perez on the team, part of the Tremont stable of fighters. Just a few hundred thousand, chump change, a rounding error in his daily profit and loss statement.

Don King, Donald Trump, and some other showboats were trying to steal away Perez, tantalizing him with ridiculous promises, including a made-for-TV bio-pic starring Ricky Martin as Frederico Perez. But Tremont held the trump card. He had promised a small gift to Fidel Castro, a deed to an oil well off the coast of Venezuela. In exchange, Castro agreed to allow Tremont’s private plane to fly Perez’s mother from Havana to Miami after the fight. King and Trump ­couldn’t pull off that kind of deal. To prepare for it, Tremont’s security guards had placed Castro’s telephone number on speed-dial in the skybox so the two barons ­could chat after the match.

Down on the canvas, the referee ­gently slapped Perez across the cheek and then clapped his hands together loudly. “Get it on, fellas!” Dickie Mill shouted. Mill was a bony-faced, jut-jawed ex-cop who enjoyed a good brawl. The networks loved him because he ­didn’t shrink from blood and ­didn’t censor or stop a violent rumble. In their battles for the attention of testosterone-charged seventeen-year-old males, Dickie Mill was their man.

With his ten-ounce left glove, Luke clumsily shoved the clear plastic mouth guard past his lips. He had been worried about the gloves, manufactured by a Mexican company. Buck Roberts called them “cripplers” because most of the padding is stuffed into the back of the glove, exposing the opponent’s face, kidneys, and cervical discs to raw knuckles. Perez’s corner had insisted on the lethal gloves.

Now Perez charged forward, his nose smeared with an oozing ­combination of blood and Vaseline. Luke glided ­toward the center of the ring. The cameras flashed around him in a 360-degree laser show, and the halogen television lights cast a savage heat. Luke stared at Perez’s fists, which the Cuban-Puerto Rican held in front of his face. Perez had a roadkill face that looked like the treads on Goodyear snow tires. His record was forty-two wins and thirteen losses. Even the victories etched deep scars into his skin. Luke’s punches had already added to the count. But Perez was tough, and his bulging, tatooed biceps kept Luke on edge.

Luke tapped Perez on the forehead with a jab, just to gauge his distance. He followed with a right cross to the shoulder, knocking Perez off balance. Or so Luke thought. Luke stepped in closer to follow with another right. That’s when Perez unleashed his own right, which came out of nowhere, to smash into Luke’s damaged eye. Luke quickly backed up and tried to cover his face. Perez glared with hunger and took another step forward.

“Cover up, Prof! Go to the ropes!” Henry advised.

The crowd leapt up roaring.

Luke worried that he was losing total vision in the left eye while the salivating Perez seemed revived. Perez unloaded another right, catching Luke on the ear. Suddenly Luke thought the crowd went silent. But it was just an eardrum that had quit on him.

Perez moved left, then right in front of Luke, testing Luke’s reflexes. He fired a left into Luke’s side and Luke winced. He knew he was in trouble. He dipped his knee, deliberately inviting Perez in closer. Perez took the bait, and delivered a left hook. Luke ducked. Perez’s wild swing left his pockmarked face open. Luke bounced off the ropes, channeled all his energy and crashed his left fist into Perez’s chin. Perez looked startled. His eyes rolled into his head. Luke lunged forward, driv­ing into Perez’s face a brutal combination of jabs and hooks. As blood and sweat sprayed across the ring, Perez fell ­toward his corner, sliding on his side. The moment his body hit the mat, the crowd turned silent, stunned by the quick reversal.

Luke immediately ran ­towards Henry. “Is it over?” he asked through his mouthpiece. “Can’t hear. Left ear is blank. Can’t see too good either.”

“You bet. He’s gone, man,” Henry replied. Then Henry gave a thumbs-up to make sure Luke got the message.

They saw a different story in Perez’s corner. Perez climbed to one knee and begged his trainer, “Stop the fight. No mas,” he said, using the infamous expression of Roberto Duran, who quit fighting Sugar Ray Leonard in a humiliating bout in 1980.

Dickie Mill heard the plea. Disappointed, he looked at Perez’s manager to overrule his fighter’s surrender. He glanced up at Tremont’s skybox too.

The manager, a beefy Hispanic, shouted to Perez: “C’mon! You’re gonna fight! You get out there, you fucker. You can beat this guy!”

Perez shook his head and pointed to his neck.

In his skybox, Paul Tremont picked up his telephone and called down to the ring. He ­didn’t care that the Reuters screen was beeping to alert him that the yen was spiking in Hong Kong and that he had just bled $25 million. “Christ, stop the fight,” he yelled to Perez’s trainer.

The cornerman was already pushing Perez out to the middle as Perez’s father rushed to ringside, his Puerto Rican flag in hand. The cornerman and Dickie Mill appealed to Papa for support. Perez looked for the stool, but his team had hurled it out of the ring. Then Papa grabbed his son by the shoulders, ignoring the jiggling flesh that used to be hard muscle.

“You will go, boy!” he said shoving his son into the ring.

“Yes! Let’s go!” screamed Dickie Mill.

“What kind of father is he?” Tremont asked behind the smoky glass. “He’s selling his son like meat.”

As Perez stumbled to his feet, his lips blue, Luke felt sick himself. Perez ­could no longer defend himself, but the crowd was cheering for a knockout. Luke ­didn’t want to hit him, so he merely pushed Perez in the chest, and the weakened fighter tripped backwards to the rope. Dickie Mill rushed over and penalized Luke two points for dodging the fighter.

“You fight or you lose, Chicken Little!” Mill shouted.

Luke shoved Perez once more. Dickie Mill again deducted points from Luke’s score.

“That’s four points, Prof. Now the score’s even,” Henry shouted. “You gotta take this guy out or we’ll lose on points.”

It started in the upper deck. An avalanche of Fritos, Milk Duds, and programs flew into the ring.

“You’re a wuss, Braden!” yelled a reporter.

A beer can crashed at his feet. From Perez’s side he heard the cackling sounds of chickens, as Perez’s fans flapped their arms in mockery.

In his opponent’s eyes Luke saw a true picture, a picture of a damaged man. Unfortunately, Perez’s eyes did not show up on the big-screen television that hovered forty feet above the ring. The pixels did not show his fear.

And so Dickie Mill grabbed Luke’s ten-ounce gloves and pulled him ­toward Perez for the final thirty seconds of the round. Perez leaned forward and Luke retreated. The chicken clucks grew louder, and beer kept splashing. A battalion of yellow-shirted security guards streamed down the aisles to tame the disgusted crowd.

A Perez fan swiped an arena microphone, flipped the switch and yelled, “No cajones, Braden!” Like a fast-moving virus, the chant broke out, “No cajones! No cajones!”

Dickie Mill grabbed Luke by the gloves again. “No cajones, no points, boy! I’m deducting two more points.” He held up two fingers to the judges.

Luke closed his eyes for a moment. He’d had the balls to stand up to his father. As a boy he’d been man enough to get through his mother’s funeral without crying. As Mill backed away and clapped his hands together to resume the round, Luke drew back his left arm. Perez was staring at the right, as Luke fired a left hook to his temple that cracked like a thunderbolt. His opponent’s head snapped to the right, his body stiffened as he dropped on his side like a heavy door knocked off its hinges.

The crowd stopped shouting. The avalanche of trash ceased. Perez’s father dropped his Puerto Rican flag and ran to the center of the ring, along with the trainer. Dickie Mill rushed over to the judges and waved for a doctor. Luke tore across the ring shouting at Henry to cut off the laces of his bloody boxing gloves.

With that last punch, Luke got back his cajones. But he paid for them with the life of Frederico Perez.

“His own father murdered him,” Paul Tremont muttered, picking up his phone and punching in the speed dial number for Fidel Castro to give him the bad news. He saw no reason to give away an oil well to a cold-hearted dictator.

CHAPTER 2

The doctors said that Luke’s punches, delivered through those crippling Mexican gloves, flooded the subarachnoid spaces of Perez’s brain with blood. Luke ­wasn’t certain what the diagnosis meant, but he did know that he had committed murder. Oh sure, he knew it ­wasn’t legally murder, though the Atlantic City police department did interrogate him. But his hands felt bloody. Just twenty-four years old, he felt banished from the ring, “Dante’s ring,” as his father called it. Though he had not spoken with his father in three years, he was now thankful that Professor Francis Braden never read the sports section of the paper.

For the next six weeks, Luke hung out in his cramped New York apartment, tucked in between the old Meatpacking District and the human meat market that was Greenwich Village. His street had become yuppified and gayified since he first remembered going down to the Village in the late 1980s. But his apartment was locked in a time warp, circa 1967. He had furnished it himself, and it had all the class and sophistication of a Brady Bunch special on television. Above his bed hung a photo of Muhammad Ali posing underwater for Life magazine in the 1960s, but the picture frame had two sides. Whenever Luke felt surly, he flipped over Ali to look at Sonny Liston, that bear of a boxer who threatened to crush his opponents’ brains with his fists. We can’t float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, and smile at the world all the time, Luke knew. We’ve all got gremlins struggling to burst out and do evil. Most of the time Luke kept Ali’s face on display. But these past six weeks had been Sonny time.

What do you do after you’ve killed a man? Luke wondered as he peered out his window with its sliver of a view of the old Woolworth Building, in 1913 the world’s tallest skyscraper at fifty-five stories. He was alive, though he still ­couldn’t hear much from his left ear. It felt like he was permanently wearing an earmuff. He leaned against a pillow, turned on the television, and tried to teach himself to read lips.

He ­couldn’t go back to Delancy’s. Buck had shouted several encouraging messages into the answering machine, using ­every foul word he’d heard in seventy years of fighting. Luke did not return the calls. After a talent scout from the William Morris Agency called about starring in some professional wrestling battle to the death, Luke yanked out the phone cord. Though he thought about twisting the wires around his own neck, he figured that he ­shouldn’t add to his body count. Frederico Perez was enough. Luke reached for the bottle of Glenlivet that he kept in the drawer next to the Gideon’s Bible he had swiped from some hotel room. His father introduced him to single-malt Scotch when Luke told him that the guys at school drank Colt 45. Now, he felt trapped in Greenwich Village between the Gideons and the untouched gift of his father. He twisted open the Glenlivet, ­didn’t bother to find a glass, and lost the rest of the evening.

But he ­couldn’t afford to stay drunk. After paying his manager, agent, and publicist, he had little of his winnings left. Six weeks after the Perez fight, he was down to the few thousand dollars he had saved from butchering beef at Smith & Wollensky’s. He ­didn’t look much better than his bank account. His six-pack abs now blended into one slight bulge at the belly, a victim of Chinese takeout and Ray’s Famous Pizza.

His apartment did not have much closet space, but he ­didn’t need a lot of room. Most of his clothes consisted of gym shorts, jockstraps, and sweatshirts crammed into a locker at Delancy’s. He owned one blue suit, and it was clean. With that blue suit and a buzz haircut, he got a job as a security guard at Gresham Bros. Investments, one of the oldest and most prestigious names in Wall Street money making. He was a “street man,” according to Gresham lingo, that is, he hung out in the lobby, accepted packages from messengers, and occasionally shooed bums from dragging their loaded shopping carts into the Broad Street building. Luke usually walked to work from the Village. The other guards were “bridge-and-­tunnel” ­people, riding the subway in from Brooklyn and Queens, often complaining about the stench of urine in the Broad Street station. None of them had fathers who were En­glish professors at Columbia. They were like the guys punching the bags at Delancy’s, only without criminal records. Also, most of them still had teeth.

In fact, his fellow guards thought Luke sounded like the young MBAs riding the elevators, who cranked out millions of dollars for the Brothers Gresham. One security guard, Lenny Baggio, actually accused Luke of being a spy for the partners.

“Why do you talk so good?” Lenny asked, through a twisted set of yellowish teeth that looked like the crowd jammed on the F train to Astoria, Queens.

“I’m an idiot savant, like Rain Man,” Luke replied. “I speak perfect En­glish, but every­thing else I do is shit.”

Each morning he would watch the twenty-something girls in their cool black suits and bobbing ponytails flirt with their blue-suited male colleagues on their way up to the trading floor, that giant ATM machine on the thirtieth floor. A lot more than thirty floors separated Luke from their turf. These young Olympians ­didn’t gather around the watercooler. They clutched Evian bottles and debated whether this year’s Australian Syrah would outsell last year’s. Then they would jump to some technical discussion about the price of pork bellies, and they ­didn’t mean McDonald’s ninety-nine-cent barbecue lunch special.

To Luke, they were like young gods and goddesses. Shit, they looked like they ­could fly to the executive floor. Watching them all day, he longed to fly with them. The Gresham team made their living with their minds, not their fists.

Instead, Luke trudged down the dark steps to his basement apartment on Jane Street. The streetlamp had blown out or had been broken by a vandal’s flying rock six months earlier, but no one in the building knew who to call at City Hall. Besides, boxers ­weren’t scared of the dark anyway, were they? He slipped the key into his paint-chipped door. The crusty lock usually required him to pull the knob ­toward him as he turned the key. Not this time. The door swung open with a creak that oil ­could not cure. Had the door been unlocked? Instinctively, he brushed his hand against his nose and tucked his chin, taking his old boxing stance. Suddenly, he felt a crack against the back of his neck and crumpled to the floor. He grabbed the side of the sofa and hauled himself up and turned ­toward the dark figure, ready to charge.

He screamed an intimidating, “FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

The dim bulb flashed on. Luke saw Buck Roberts wielding a cane like the last of the Three Musketeers, the one who lived long enough to collect Social Security. Luke rubbed the back of his neck where the cane had struck him.

“Buck, what the fuck are you doing here? And why’re you trying to kill me?”

The old man was out of breath, but grinned broadly. “I’m here to drag you back to the gym. I ­didn’t train you to be a wuss security guard,” Buck said.

Even in the dim light of a dusty 40-watt bulb, Luke ­could see that Buck had lost weight. Six months ago he was eighty-five, but looked like a spry seventy-five. He was still eighty-five, but now looked ninety. Buck’s ticker was ticking down.

“Besides,” Buck added, “you can’t be very good at your job if you let an old man beat you with a walking stick.”

“Forget it, Buck. I’m done. No more corpses. The next one ­could be mine—”

“Kid, I believe in you.”

“Yeah, well that makes one of us.” Luke slipped off his blue blazer and slumped onto the sofa, massaging his neck. Buck leaned against the wall, wheezing.

“So that’s how it ends, Luke? You just quit and watch elevators fly up and down an office building the rest of your life?”

“Yeah, Buck. It ain’t the fights. But lemme tell you this. When a guy rides a corporate elevator up, it ­doesn’t crush some guy waiting for his turn.”

Luke thought about Buck all night. After he made his first few million, he’d donate a chunk to a home for old boxers. Buck deserved a rest.

CHAPTER 3

The 150-foot yacht with the 3,000 horsepower, triple-turbo engines bounced in the high waves a few miles off the southeast coast of Key West. The boat had massive power, but, weather permitting, Tremont preferred to sail under the wind power. The skies had darkened, and a storm was flying in from the Caymans. Paul Tremont clutched the mast and wondered whether he’d be able to drink his Glenfiddich before it spilled on him. He looked below deck at his guests, Senator Harold Leopard of Florida, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the executive director of the Peace Corps. They looked like a rainbow coalition huddled together, not because of their ethnicities, but because sea-sickness turned them into shades of gray, green, and blue.

“Can I get anyone some aspirin or Dramamine?” Tremont offered.

His guests shook their heads.

A motorboat appeared about a hundred yards off the port side. Tremont threw his Scotch overboard and picked up his binoculars. It was the Coast Guard. He looked at the motorboat’s trajectory and saw a smaller, flat vessel. He twisted the lenses of the binoculars, squinted, and concluded that it was a raft. Now, why would the Coast Guard chase a raft? To help it? No. To commandeer it and arrest the raft ­people—Cubans, no doubt—to make sure they did not make it to the shores of America. To Tremont, the Coast Guard boat was like graffiti on the Statue of Liberty, an attack on America’s principles.

“Patrick,” he yelled at his skipper, “full speed ahead! Catch the Coast Guard.”

The captain was cautious. “Mr. Tremont, that’s dangerous. You ­wouldn’t chase a highway patrol car on the Jersey Turnpike, would you?”

“Patrick, don’t argue. I’ll pay your bail if anything happens.”

With the waves slapping against the hull, the yacht cut through the wave-tossed waters and finally caught up to the Coast Guard cutter. By then, two officers had hustled the boat ­people onto the government vessel. Through his binoculars, Tremont ­could see a man and woman, probably in their forties, hugging two little kids. They all wore ragged pants and

T-shirts. Tremont suddenly smiled. He ran below deck to his guests.

“C’mon up here. Look at this. Senator, look at this!” he said excitedly. “Look at those shirts.”

By the time Tremont’s woozy guests got on deck, they were just a few feet from the raft and the Coast Guard. The parents and children wore T-shirts haphazardly hand-painted with stripes: red, white and blue. On the rickety raft, Tremont ­could see three small paint buckets.

“You see that, Harold?” Tremont said. “They ­didn’t have the nerve to paint stripes until they’d escaped the Cuban Navy.”

The Coast Guard officers angrily waved at Patrick to stand off. Patrick began to shift into reverse.

“Hold it, Patrick!” Tremont shouted. He picked up a megaphone.

“Officers, please let these ­people go. This is Paul Tremont. I will take them into my custody and sponsor them. You can check my credentials with Florida Senator Harold Leopard.”

The officers smirked. One of them, a thin man in his sixties, cupped his hands and shouted, “I don’t care if you’re the pope, you’re not messing with Coast Guard business! Now move off or we’ll impound your vessel.”

Senator Leopard turned from green to red and nearly jumped off the yacht. “Jesus Christ, Paul, don’t get me in the middle of this! I’m not here.” He ducked below.

Tremont furrowed his brow. He needed a new approach. He picked up the megaphone again and asked, “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

The officers conferred with each other and appeared to agree it would do no harm. After all, they knew who Paul Tremont was. Everyone did. He was very rich and very famous and very powerful.

“Granted,” the skinny one answered, “if you can get here without kill­ing yourself.”

Patrick brought the bouncing yacht within seven feet of the Coast Guard cutter. Tremont quickly grabbed a line and tied a knot around his mainmast. With a few steps as a headstart he swung out over his yacht and then shimmied down to land on the motorboat.

Tremont saw that the Cubans were shivering and that their faces were badly sunburned and covered with sores.

“What’s this about?” the other officer, a young guy in his twenties, asked.

Tremont realized that the family needed more than a first aid kit. “We don’t have time to bullshit, fellas. These ­people mean nothing to you, just another traffic stop. They mean a lot to me, though, because I’m a patriot. The storm’s picking up. You ­could be helping other ­people if you ­didn’t have to waste your time here, right?”

The officers just stared, hands on hips, seemingly unmoved.

“It’s a lot of water, the Gulf of Mexico. You ­could go days without running into somebody, right? Let’s say we never ran into each other.” Tremont reached into his pocket.

The young officer flinched. “He’s reaching for a gun!” The officer tried to withdraw his revolver from the holster, but before he ­could do so, Tremont pulled his wallet from his pocket.

“Here’s $2,000.” He counted out a stack of 100s. “Just a random event in the great big sea. Let me get these ­people some help.”

“Hey,” the young officer said, “we turn down bribes from drug ­dealers.”

“I’m glad you do.”

“Why should we take this? Just because you’re Paul Tremont?”

“Because this one’s going to make you feel more like an American and less like a bureaucrat or, even worse, a stooge of Castro.”

The older officer looked down at the quaking family.

“Forget it, no deal,” the young one said to Tremont. “Keep your cash.”

But the older one put his hand on his partner’s shoulder and whispered, “Put it in your pocket, son.” The kid was young, inexperienced, but he knew enough to obey his superior, and that few ­people said “no” to Paul Tremont.

A few hours later, Tremont delivered the frightened family to a church relief mission near the docks of North Miami Beach.

The following morning, Tremont was sitting at his desk in Manhattan.

Paul Tremont ­could never be president of the United States. Only ­people born in the U.S. ­could be president. He missed by 600 miles, having been born to British parents in Bermuda. But that ­didn’t stop the mogul from ruling over his own empire from an oval office, sitting in front of a white-fluted fireplace in a rocking chair that was a replica of Jack Kennedy’s. Behind him, eighty stories above Manhattan, grew a rose garden.

The tall man wore thick pinstripes, which made him seem even taller and more massive than his six-foot-three frame. His hair stylist combed back his reddish-brown hair in a way that added an extra inch. Tremont rocked back and forth in the chair, gazing serenely down Broadway.

The hottest architects in the world had lobbied to design Tremont’s headquarters on Broadway, the biggest project since the 9/11 memorial. He set up the most furious and frustrating competition ever designed, a humiliation to name-brand architects. For a fee of $25,000, the architects logged onto a closed-circuit presentation by Tremont, in which he presented his ideas for an office building. Then the entrants had five days to design a model that fulfilled his mission. That was not the humiliating part. They did not know that after submitting their models, Tremont would submit the bids to a nationwide American Idol-like poll—of eighth-grade schoolchildren. This ensured that the winner, as well as the losers, would feel stupid. It also put Tremont’s smiling face on the coveted cover of People magazine under the headline, “Mogul for Children.” The body of the story also touted his charitable gifts to UNICEF and the Peace Corps.

As for Tremont’s headquarters building, the exterior looked like a teenage boy’s dream: a sleek, edgy, steel skyscraper with corners sharper than Ginsu knives. But the staid Georgian interior offended ­everyone born after 1850. On the whole, Tremont had bred a cross between James Bond and James Madison. The critic for the New Yorker called it a ­“derivative nightmare.” To which the financier famously responded, “And that’s where the money came from, derivatives.”

As Tremont rocked in his chair, two men entered his oval office. The first was Dr. Stuart Burns, a five-foot-five dandy who ­would’ve looked splendid on top of a wedding cake. He’d picked the perfect silver Gucci frames for his round, pink face. Every evening he wore a tuxedo, whether he was attending the symphony or just strolling down to check out the prostitutes on Ninth Avenue. But why did a super-financier like Tremont need a trained psychiatrist? The firm’s secretaries figured that Burns’s job was to ensure that Tremont ­didn’t lose control of his vicious temper and throw someone off his rose garden terrace. In fact, Tremont relied on Burns to vet new personnel and make sure they fit in with the Tremont “ethos.”

Burns strutted into the oval office with a clipped gait, pocketwatch dangling from his hip, like a noble aide to Kaiser Wilhelm. No one would have guessed his family was from the slums of Palermo, and Burns was a translation of the Italian Bruciare. He told ­people he was a Scot and each year he celebrated Robbie Burns’s birthday with bagpipes and a haggis dinner. Tremont knew the truth, but played along. He liked employees with secrets. The threat of exposure kept them honest.

Burns entered one step ahead of Chris­tian Playa, who wore short-sleeved shirts to show off his bulging forearms. He was about the same height as Burns, but if the shrink belonged on a wedding cake, Playa would be the Teamster delivering it from the bakery. His sixty-year-old tanned face was marked by creases so deep you ­could run a credit card down them. No one ­really knew the color of his eyes because no one wanted to stare into them long enough to see.

“What do you have for me, boys?” Tremont asked, knowing that Burns and Playa ­couldn’t stand each other.

“I’ve got your man, Mr. Tremont,” Playa said with a grin that exposed tall, narrow teeth like tombstones.

“He’s nuts,” Dr. Burns replied. On the street he might be afraid of Playa, but he felt that his close relationship with Tremont would keep Playa at bay.

Playa pushed a button on the wall, and an oil painting of George Washington transformed into a projection screen. A bird’s-eye view of the Braden/Perez match filled the screen. The image then closed in on Luke Braden delivering the death blow to Perez’s temple. Then the crumpled Perez writhing on the canvas, followed by a shot of Braden, torn between horror and triumph.

Tremont stared, recalling his $50,000 bet on Perez. “Life is cheap under Castro. At least I got to screw him out of an oil well.”

Burns bit his lip to stay quiet.

“Is Braden our man?” Tremont asked.

“Yeah, DNA confirms it,” Playa answered. “He’s your secret weapon for the Cuba mission.”

“Where is he now?”

“Gresham Bros. So we can hire him anytime.”

Burns had to jump in.

“Are you guys crazy? Paul, this kid knows nothing about finance, and you’re going to invite him into the inner sanctum?”

Tremont was always amused to hear his psychiatrist allow the pitch of his voice to rise from tenor to boy soprano.

Burns continued. “Why? If you’re going to hire a tool to do your dirty work, at least find one with some brains and a working knowledge of Wall Street. NYU and Columbia spit them out by the hundreds. And they’d all die for the chance to work for Tremont Advisors.”

“You’re wrong this time, Stuart. I don’t need another brain to churn out multiple regression equations; I need some muscle. This kid’s got just enough IQ points to do the job. I believe in giving young ­people an opportunity. Plus he’s got the right connections. And, God knows, he’s not afraid of blood.”

Burns tried to contain his frustration. Tremont usually deferred to him on hiring judgments. “So he’s perfect, Paul?”

“No, not yet. He needs to be tested. We need to test his loyalty. Make him de­pen­dent on us. Then he’s ours to do what we need. Anything. You’ll see.”

Tremont rocked in his chair, while his loyal aides jockeyed to see who ­could exit the room first.

In the hallway, Burns turned to Playa. “He never blinks, does he?”

“Blinking is weakness,” Playa explained. “How many negotiations has Tremont won when the other guy blinked?”

Excerpted from THE CASTRO GENE © Copyright 2008 by Todd Buchholz. Reprinted with permission by Oceanview Publishing. All rights reserved.

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