Havana (38 page)

The old men were pleased. Really, there was no bad news, except of course for the tragedy of Frankie Carbine, but Frankie, that boy had always been a hothead, and it was in the cards that sooner or later, someone would blow that hot head off. That was his talent; that was his destiny.

“He lived a soldier, he died a soldier,” said one of the old men in the smokey social club on a completely undistinguished street in Brooklyn. Then he took a sip of his sweet red wine, then a taste of his sweet black coffee, then a puff of his long brown cigar.

“He went out hard,” said another. “That's to his credit. He done his job, he took his pay, may he rest in well-earned peace.”

But nobody was truly upset over Frankie. What were his prospects, really? It is the duty of some to serve and die so that others may live and prosper. That is the way it has always been; that is the way it will always be. All the men in this room had done their jobs in hard places, all had survived by guile and cruelty and courage and relentless ambition. It was not in them, really, to mourn a fellow who hadn't quite made it up the ladder. And, too, there were other champions to celebrate.

“The Jew, see? He is so smart. I hate to say it, but in some ways this Jew is more valuable than a dozen soldiers. A hundred, even. This Jew, so smart, he presses everything for advantage and he always wins that advantage. He is the house odds twice over. Plus, he only scrapes a little off the top. Not much, just a little.”

The news had just come from Meyer. The scandal of the bloody battle in the Shanghai Theater between guerillas and the police—though of course everyone knew it was between Frankie's men and competing vice lords, fighting for control of Old Havana's thereto-fore independent brothels, and that Frankie, though dead, had nevertheless won—had scared El Presidente and, frightened, he had decided that his future lay in more cooperation with the old men, not less.

Thus, in private, through discreet emissaries, El Presidente had agreed to certain concessions planned to make the road between him and his American supporters more stable, not less. Instead of taking 20 percent off the top, he was now content with 18 percent. Instead of 10 percent of all heroin moneys, he would accept 8 percent. And as for those very profitable independent brothels in the old town, once under the iron control of that fiery rogue El Colorado and in play ever since his untimely end, he would look the other way if certain Americans of experience took over management. The
policia
had been so informed and would cooperate; the word was now being spread, by various means, to the working men and women of that quarter. Their new masters would soon appear and things would be managed more scientifically, after the modern fashion of the
norteamericanos.

But best of all, because of a new and very cooperative young man in the intelligence service, pressures against subversives, radicals, students,
communistas
were all to be increased, as in the grand old days of other strongmen. This meant the possibility of unrest and upheaval was much, much smaller, which meant in turn the investment possibilities were much, much more attractive. It was even rumored that Hilton planned to erect a huge hotel near the Nacional!

And that one? The one whose mischief had so scared them a few months ago? Why, he was in prison and would stand trial in the fall and his sentence would be life at least. Our government agents had taken care of it. Wasn't it nice when everybody got along? It was so much better than the old way. If only those
strunzas
of the FBI…but that was another matter.

An old man raised a nice glass of Sambuca.

“My friends,” he said, “I propose a toast. We are secure now. It doesn't matter what Chicago does in Las Vegas. Our island will pour its treasures into our strongboxes forever. Las Vegas can rise or fall, its sponsors can succeed or fail, it doesn't matter, not a bit. The future is ours.”

They all raised their glasses to a wondrous tomorrow, a Cuba forever theirs, untouched, untainted, tamed and perfected. It was the American way.

 

There had been some sickness, but strong as a horse and full of pride and ego, he had survived. Poison? Some would say so. It would be easy to do here in the prison, where certain people could be bribed, certain people controlled. After all, he had many enemies, and many twisted in envy and malice at his name.

There was plenty to hate. He admitted that. Rarely are men given so many gifts as he. He had foresight, wisdom, strength, courage, stubbornness, stamina, and the poet's feeling for the soaring lyric. Women adored him, mothers worshipped him, men followed him.

The trial was but weeks away.

Yet he knew it was but another opportunity.

“History will absolve me,” he had written, and he knew it to be true. History would also celebrate him, then obey him and finally yield to him.

I will show you, papa,
he thought.
I will show you.

“And so he escaped,” asked Pashin.

“Yes. He certainly caused a ruckus. What a scandal,” said Frenchy Short, “and how lucky, really, he got away, or I'd have had some very awkward explaining to do.”

“Remarkable. I'd bet that asshole Speshnev had something to do with it. He has not been seen in days.”

“Old men. Tricky old bastards. Too many tricks.”

“Their day will come, soon enough. Maybe not this year, but certainly the next.”

The two sat at the old bar called the two brothers—
Dos Hermanos
—down by the waterfront, across from the Customs House. The ferry full of cars from Florida was just pulling in. They were drinking mojitos, because for once there was little to do. It was a Saturday, late in the afternoon, and overhead gulls glided and screamed, and out front the traffic roared along.

“And you are off to West Berlin?” Pashin asked.

“Yes. I thought maybe Plans would renege on his promise when the gangsters failed to get Earl, but I suspect he realizes I know too much and have too much talent. And he'd already been telling people what a find I was, how I was the next him. I could be too, you know.”

“I know. You are a formidable young man.”

“Of course all this is possible, my friend, because you got me that picture of yourself and poor Roger. Saved the Short bacon but good. That was the Big Noise! Boola-boola! What a stroke of genius!”

“Wasn't it. But it wasn't mine. Speshnev used the same photo to blackmail
me,
can you believe it? The audacity of the man. He is a classic technician though, one must say.”

“So I'm a hero. And for you?”

“Well, the old fox has promised to use his influence on my behalf as well. So with your supervisor believing in you and the current man of the hour Speshnev fulfilling his part of our bargain, I do believe I'll be moving ahead shortly to a better posting. Plus, of course there are family allies working for me in Moscow. So this has worked out very well for both of us, I think. Possibly I'll get to Berlin as well.”

“Wouldn't that be a treat! Imagine how much fun we could have!”

“Imagine how far we could go. I'd give you all my colleagues' operations and you'd give me all your colleagues' operations. Yours and mine would flourish, theirs would fail. We'd be chiefs in a year!”

“The future,” said Frenchy Short, “has never looked better. Progress is our most important product!”

The two young men raised a toast to their brilliant futures.

The boy had worked it out, he knew what he had to do, he set about to do it in an orderly fashion. He prepared for the day in the cool blaze of fall when he could fire a rifle and bring down a deer. It wasn't that he wanted to kill the animal for the pleasure of the killing. It wasn't even that the family could use the meat, though of course it could. It was, rather, some sense that in the spring, with his father, he had failed. And that very day his father had vanished, and not come back. So in his mind the two were connected: his failure, his father's disappearance. He solved this problem in a direct fashion: he would bring his father back to him by killing a deer and in some way changing fate.

He'd thought about his failure. He lacked confidence. When he'd brought the rifle up, its heaviness quickly overcame him. He believed he saw a wobble at the front sight and knew he could not yet shoot well enough to slay the creature cleanly, and so he'd panicked. That is how he reasoned.

Therefore salvation lay in the rifle. It was a Winchester .30-30, turned gray, close to purple, for the wear on its once royal-blue finish. It had a steel crescent of a butt plate, and was thin and rattly.

He shot it every morning and every afternoon. A father should teach a boy these things but he committed to the rifle not with his father but to save his father. He read books on the rifle. He didn't understand the words sometimes, but he labored onward, educating himself, applying his mind and finding what his talents were. He studied ballistics tables, a helter-skelter of numbers that eventually clarified into something hard and clean and truthful. He talked to men who were hunters or known for their shooting ability. He gave himself to the rifle.

“All that boy does is shoot,” his mother would say. “I'm glad he's doing
something,
because, Lord knows, when Earl was first gone, he just sat around with a long face. But somewhere he decided he would make himself the best shot in the county and surprise his daddy when his daddy comes home, and now it is a full obsession with him.”

The boy drew guns in the margins of his schoolbooks and read the famous writers on guns, Elmer Kaye and Jack O'Brien and even the late Ed McGriffin's great book,
Fast Guns and Trick Shots.
He read
Field and Stream
and
Sports Afield
and
The American Rifleman.
He went to the library and read
A Rifleman Went to War
and
With British Snipers to the Reich
and biographies of Audie Ryan and Alvin York, heroes of the rifle. He read all the Samworth books on firearms and hunting and soon enough knew a Luger from a .45 and a Peacemaker from a Schofield and a Nambu from an Ortgies. The more he read, the more he knew; for some reason, the information just stuck in his mind, and he saw connections and controversies and lessons.

His own shooting abilities grew steadily; it seemed he had a talent, just like his daddy. He could hit things. He knew soon enough to read his own heart, and to shoot between beats. His finger grew subtle and disciplined in the ways it pressed against the trigger, so that it never jerked or hurried, but always came back in the same smooth way, waiting for the trigger on the old 94 to break off, feeling the springs fight him and then snap. He took a hundred dryfired shots every night and by the second week did it with a penny balanced on the top of the receiver so that in pulling the trigger he didn't disturb the sight picture. He worked all the positions. He built the subtle undermuscles that made him rock-steady in any position.

The hot months of July and August gave way to September. A crispness came to the air, and ever so slowly the lushness of the west Arkansas woods began to suggest the coming of riotous color, a last blast of activity before the snow. So it was fall. So he had worked obsessively for two months. So a spurt of growth had come to him in his obsessiveness and he no longer had a boy's body, but was acquiring what would become a man's body. So now he stood back of the house in a hollow where he had improvised a shooting range. So now he inserted a .30-30 and with easy, steady, practiced fluidity, worked the lever, seating the round. The rifle came up steadily, steadied, and he found his position, the right balance of tightness, looseness, strength, and gentleness. At last the front sight settled in. It would never be dead still, but he knew that the figure-eight it traced would grow smaller and stiller until at last he could anticipate when it was on the target, and when that happened, at some instinctive level, he fired. He didn't hear the report, he didn't feel the recoil.

Far off a puff of dust rose behind a target stand. He called the shot perfect, and knew it was perfect. He opened the action of the rifle, shucked the spent case, picked up his father's binoculars, and indeed saw a cluster of holes in the ten-ring a hundred yards away. He could put bullets there hour after hour.

He turned, feeling good about what he had taught himself to do, seeing some value in it.

My daddy would be proud, he thought.

He picked up the shell, put it in his pocket for later reloading, and climbed from the hollow. It was near dark. A chill sliced the air. He shivered. Somehow time had passed. And then he saw the man.

It looked like a hobo, skinny and bent, shuffling up the long driveway from Route 8 a half-mile away, looking for a handout. The man walked wearily, as if his journey had been long and hard, and nothing in him seemed familiar.

And then of course it seemed all familiar, for the man assembled himself, almost magically, into his father.

“Daddy!” he screamed. His heart jumped, a spasm of pleasure and relief shot through him. He danced, he skipped, he ran, he ran, he ran.

His father, by cruel magic a much older man now, watched him come, and knelt to absorb the boy in his arms and lift him and hug him.

“Daddy, Daddy, I won't never miss no deer again, I swear to you, I promise, Daddy.”

“That's fine, Bob Lee, it don't matter. I am home to stay and you can bet on that one!”