White Shadow (52 page)

The cheers grew louder as the back door to the armory opened like a mouth and the figures disappeared.

Dodge was alone in the headlights.

He heard the bells of a nearby church.

He smelled the bread from a nearby bakery.

He looked at the blood on his hands and on his forearms and ripped at his torn shirt and tried to stop the bleeding.

EARLIER THAT DAY, the Old Jew warmed himself in a patch of sunlight in Santo Trafficante’s Vedado apartment as Beny Moré played on a new hi-fi Jimmy Longo brought from Tampa. Mary Josephine and Sarah Ann were at the beach with their mother, and Santo and the Old Jew discussed Catholic schools and grocery stores and perhaps hiring a full-time maid for the family. The Old Jew told stories of Santo’s father and of times twenty years back, and then he talked about Lucky Luciano trying to break his nose when he was a kid and he talked about Bugsy Siegel being stubborn about turning a profit in Las Vegas to the end, and the Old Jew’s voice trailed off with the cigar burning out in his hand. And Jimmy Longo would relight it and he would start again in that patch of light as if he were a mechanical toy loaded with a quarter. He’d take a sip off a cold daiquiri made fresh from grapefruit and lime, and they sat in a small circle, the three of them, with Lanksy’s two men waiting for him in the lobby reading copies of the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
with .38s packed tight against their ribs. “So we’re done?” asked Lansky, the Old Jew.

And Santo Trafficante looked at no one but Lansky and nodded.

He sat close to Lanksy in the falling afternoon light and pulled a cigarette from a silver case in his gray suit. He lit the cigarette and leaned back, and the men looked at each other and perhaps thought of nothing but money.

“Your family?”

Trafficante nodded. “Josephine and I have talked about it. My girls need a normal life.”

“America is goddamned smug and self-satisfied. There’s no room for men like us anymore. Your father would have done the same thing.”

Trafficante smoked down the cigarette and then held it tight in pinched fingers. He squinted his eyes in the light, and the sun had grown orange and dark along the bay and along the Malecón. He felt alone, but stronger in some way.

“You know I invited that son of a bitch Batista to the Nacional opening and he turned me down,” Lansky said. “He said he’d take a picture with Eartha Kitt for the papers but he wouldn’t stay. He doesn’t like the tourists to see the government hanging out in casinos.”

“He may have a point.”

“He may,” Lansky said. “The old days are gone, my friend. No more blood oaths and Sicilian bullshit. Everyone knows this. We make money here. We stand for nothing that is not business.”

“Of course.”

“I know about your troubles in Tampa,” Lansky said. “Can you leave them?”

He nodded.

“You are a smart boy. You’re young and you understand all this. But you know there are others, the New York people, who will be on us. I need to know you are with me and you stand for what we have here. This is our slice. I made this world and I made Batista and I made everything. That’s worth fighting for. In America, they’d lock us up like animals for being businessmen.”

Trafficante looked over at Longo. Longo nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

Lansky gripped the younger man’s hand and squeezed it tight. He smiled like a gentle old grandfather and looked him in the eye. Lansky’s face was tanned and worn like a beaten leather shoe. He had jug ears and a large nose, and his eyelids drooped at the corners as if the whole world bored the hell out of him. “Good, good. Now, we must get to work.”

The light shifted along the glass wall facing the west and the room became bright with the setting sun. Trafficante lifted a club soda and clinked his glass with Longo and the Old Jew, a cigarette in his fingers.

Beny Moré played “Mucho Corazón.”

“You people from Tampa are tough,” Lansky said. “Did I ever tell you about the time Charlie Wall tried to get a foot in Havana?”

Trafficante shook his head.

“I sent a couple of shooters up to Tampa,” he said. “The sons of bitches blew out the back window of his Cadillac and winged him. But they missed the bastard. Charlie Wall had the whole Tampa Police Department looking for revenge. They even sent Ralph Reina down here to ask around. Can you believe that? Ralph Reina and the cops?”

Trafficante nodded.

“Charlie was never satisfied,” Lansky said. “He always wanted to be sitting right where we are now.” Lansky smiled a tight grin. “That old Cracker could never walk away from the table unless he was told. When was that? Thirty-nine? Christ.”

The Old Jew looked at Santo and smiled, and Santo knew that the Old Jew wanted him to understand that he understood everything. Even without saying it.

Santo looked out the apartment balcony and saw his girls’ swimsuits and beach towels buckling in a light breeze and drying in the sun. At the door, their plastic red suitcases waited packed and ready for their return home to Tampa.

He’d tell them tonight to unpack. They’d never go back.

There would be no more FBI men watching their pool parties or following his wife to the market. There would be no more goddamned lousy newspapermen calling their house asking him about being a criminal. And there would be no more goddamned lousy stories about bribery charges in St. Pete or the bolita business or the Feds. His daughters would live as they should and be treated as they should. They could have friends without some uptight mother not letting her kids play with those no-good Sicilians.

They would have a good home here with good schools. And all he had to do was think about how to make money. They’d make a lot of money.

The Old Jew winked at him.

The cigarette felt warm in Santo’s hand.

FIDEL FOUND a place to speak.

The CIO Hall on Broadway in Ybor City.

There had been flyers passed out to cigar workers and bills posted in Cuban cafés. He’d made the rounds with Manteiga to the outposts of the Cuban community, from the Fourth of July to the Silver Ring. He’d shaken hands and debated politics. He’d sat with elderly men playing dominoes at the Centro Asturiano and smoked cigarettes with young men outside factories who only knew Cuba in stories from their parents. He made them all feel a part of what was going on. He painted a picture of grand ownership of the island that had been beaten and abused for centuries.

Several wooden chairs sat empty that afternoon as Fidel stepped to the silver-honeycomb microphone. Maybe about three hundred or so showed up to hear what the angry young lawyer had to say. I think most were just curious. Or maybe they were just bored on a Sunday afternoon.

I sat in a row of seats taken by three local FBI men who’d been ordered to come by J. Edgar himself. They chewed gum and crossed their arms and nudged each other and whispered if they understood a bit of his Spanish.

Manteiga sat behind me and repeated important parts of the speech.

Fidel began his speech talking about the 26th of July and the men who had died in the raid on the Moncada Barracks. He talked about the young men who had only hunting rifles or farm equipment. He told of the brutal retaliation of Batista, who had ten men killed for every soldier killed at Moncada. He said the youth of Cuba wanted change. He spoke of a free Cuba that wasn’t a slave to the United States or to American criminals.

Fidel spoke of Batista losing the election in ’53 and taking over the country in a military coup.

“My movement will end only when tyranny is dead or we are dead,” he said. He flattened his hands out in a sweeping gesture before him. “If Batista does not resign, there will be revolution. If he does, there will be no bloodshed.”

He looked out into the audience and pointed to the empty chairs.

“These chairs hold the spirits of my comrades who fought with me and died,” he said. People coughed and wiggled in their hard seats. The speech rolled over the people in an elegant wave of Spanish. One of the FBI men began to doze but was jerked awake by the climax of one of Fidel’s major points when the working-class crowd began to applaud.

“I have not come to America to ask for money from the American people,” he said. “I have only come to speak to the Cuban people who are in exile.”

He would roll into another slow deliberate speech that would build and build into a cascade of rolling, flowing Spanish that would break into a crescendo of emotion.

“The struggle is the
six thousand
Cubans who are out of work who want to earn their daily bread honestly . . . the
five thousand
farm-workers who live in miserable huts, who work four months and go hungry for the rest of the year . . . the
four hundred thousand
industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been stolen . . . the
one hundred thousand
small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs, contemplating it as Moses did the Promised Land, only to die before owning it . . . the
thirty thousand
self-sacrificing and devoted teachers and professors who are so badly treated and poorly paid . . . the
twenty thousand
debt-ridden small merchants, ruined by economic crisis . . . the
ten thousand
young professionals who leave the schools with their degrees, only to find themselves in a dead alley. . . . To these people, whose road of anguish is paved with deceit and false promises, we are going to say, ‘Here you are, now fight with all your might so that you may be free and happy!’”

Fidel was large and poised and spoke with authority. People listened. The FBI men started to take notes. I listened to Fidel, but I watched the faces.

They were with him. The bored, the curious. They all believed him.

“It looked as if the Apostle Martí was going to die in the year of the centennial of his birth,” he said. “It looked as if his memory would be extinguished forever, so great was the affront! But he lives. He has not died. His people are rebellious, his people are worthy, his people are faithful to his memory. Cubans have fallen defending his doctrines. Young men, in a magnificent gesture of reparation, have come to give their blood and to die at the side of his tomb so that he might continue to live in the heart of his countrymen. O Cuba, what would have become of you if you had let the memory of your apostle die!”

After the speech, old hats were passed around and soon became filled with dollar bills and change. Fidel stayed for a few hours after that, shaking hands and talking more. He helped count the money that amounted to a couple hundred bucks. I watched him fold the dollar bills and register it in a ledger. The money was placed in a shabby briefcase, and as he clicked it closed I remember thinking that this young man did not have a chance.

I’d seen pictures of Batista, with his gold watch and his palace. I knew of State Department visits and sales of aircrafts and weapons and grinning photo ops of Batista with Vice President Nixon.

I liked Fidel very much. But I knew he was quite insane.

He was angry and broken inside. I had no question he would die for his cause.

I later walked outside the CIO Hall with Castro and Manteiga.

It was brisk and windy, and Fidel pulled his thin pin-striped suit coat tight over his body. He turned up the collar on the coat and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“You were serious about running the criminals out of Cuba?” I asked.

He nodded at me.

“I wish I could help more,” I said.

“You help most of all,” Fidel said, shaking my hand and thanking me. “Without journalists, there would be no truth, and the people would not know of tyranny and injustice and of ways things may change. Tell your readers about this. Tell them what I said. Let them decide.”

I shook his hand again and drove back to the
Times
newsroom to file my story.

It was Sunday, and I had to let myself in with a key.

I flicked on a back row of lights and sat at my empty desk. I heard the cold November wind outside and the electric buzz of the lights over my head. I fed my L.C. Smith with fresh paper and began to type the dateline YBOR CITY.

I wrote the lead five times.

I wrote of a hero. I wrote of a savior.

I made Fidel Castro sound like Jesus Christ and José Martí and George Washington.

I stopped.

I wrote the story straight and pulled the sheets from the typewriter.

I smoked a couple of cigarettes.

It was so quiet in the room.

I used a key to open my file cabinet in the bottom drawer of my desk.

I pulled out the worn copy of
The Fighting Cock
and flipped through the pages. I never dared to take Charlie Wall’s book home with me. I kept it buried under files and newsclips. I hadn’t discovered its true meaning until after Eleanor had been killed and then I understood why Charlie Wall, on the night before he was murdered, wanted old Bill Robles to so desperately have this book.