Naked In Havana (Naked Series Book 1)

by Colin Falconer

  And so every night the shutters in the houses rattled and glasses clinked on tables in the clubs and bars as Havana was rocked by bombs and small arms fire. By then the tourists were too drunk or too excited to pay any attention, it was all just part of the floor show. The revolution didn’t stop the entertainment, it was part of the entertainment.

  The sense of danger, of being on the edge of something, made the music more vibrant, the dancing more heated, the sex more urgent. The price for flights from Miami was down to thirty-six dollars, there were advertisements in the Miami Herald: “55 minutes of sheer pleasure, 5 swift flights daily.”

  Havana was one non-stop party for the rich and famous. You could order a daiquiri in the lobby bar of the Dauphin or the Biltmore - if you could afford it - and rub shoulders with Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, Edith Piaf or Ava Gardner. You could watch Ginger Rogers at the Nacional or Nat King Cole at the Sans Souci.

  And the music! On the other side of the Florida Strait they might be listening to “At The Hop” and jive and Elvis Presley, but in Havana it was still the forties, still Basie and Ellington and Chico O'Farrill. We danced to the mambo and the rumba.

  The headline act at the Tropicana was Beni Moré - whom I had last seen at Angel’s engagement party - perhaps the greatest Cuban entertainer of all time. You could sit under the stars with John Wayne and Rocky Marciano and Ernest Hemingway and watch him dance onto the stage in a straw guajiro's hat and cane and mug his way through “Como Fue.”

  If you didn’t lose all your money in Salvatore’s casino, afterwards you could grab a cab when the clubs closed and head to La Rampa to watch the sun rise and listen to Bebo Valdés and Negro Vivar along with Errol Flynn and Cesar Romero and Marlon Brando.

  The smaller clubs like Papi’s were clustered around the Prado and La Rampa. We were small and intimate so we couldn’t present the ambitious floor shows of the Mob’s places in Marianao and La Playa. Instead, there was dark mood lighting and cosy velour banquettes, clubs designed for lovers. Once we even had Eartha Kitt play.

  That night he was drinking Santiago rum; I had Coca Cola. I was only eighteen years old, I was lucky to be there at my father’s table and under his watchful eye.

  There was a small conjunto band, a smaller version of the huge orchestras that played the Tropicana and Sans Souci, and instead of a troupe of dancers we had two or three girls who performed out front. Papi said that the Left Bank was where real Cuban music lived and breathed.

  Most nights you could listen to boleristas like Olga Guillot, Ñico Membiela or Inocencia Velasquez, my piano teacher. Inocencia was the crowd favourite. You could sit right up close, so close you could see the beads of sweat glistening between her breasts and the monogrammed initials on the man’s handkerchief she clutched in her fist as she sang. She was sensual and she was beautiful and she was raw. A real handmade woman, as we say in Cuba.

  There were no Bach études tonight. Behind her, the pianist played the piano like he had a personal grudge, violent chords backed by a double bass, as raw a sound as I had ever heard. And over the top, Inocencia's voice, husky, harsh and angry.

  When I look in your eyes

  I see how I used to be

  When I look in the mirror

  I see what’s become of me

  I can’t stay here with you

  I know you’ll break my heart

  It’s love that brings us together

  It’s love that tears me apart

  The handkerchief twisted round and round in her fist. Her eyes were screwed tight, and she seemed as if she was in physical pain. I almost wanted to rush up onto the stage and rescue her.

  I turned to see if Papi was as moved by the music as I was, but he wasn’t even watching Inocencia. His eyes were turned off to the side. He was tapping his finger on the glass, pretending to listen, but there was something else bothering him. I followed his gaze; a man in a white suit with a gardenia in his buttonhole had just walked in. He was dressed impeccably, he wore a bow tie, even in the heat. I recognized his bodyguard first, the man leaning on the black Cadillac the day I got home from San Lorenzo.

  This must be Meyer Lansky. He didn’t look like a gangster with that nose and big ears. He was no George Raft.

  “Excuse me, cariña,” Papi said and got up and went over to the bar to greet him. I watched them shake hands, and then Papi led him to his office at the back of the club.

  Inocencia finished her set to tumultuous applause. She looked exhausted.

  “Hey baby,” a voice said in my ear. I looked around, it was Angel. My heart jumped but I tried to look disinterested.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m with my father and some of his friends.”

  I turned around and saw Macheda and his cronies, my father always saved them the best seats, not far from ours. I hadn’t seen them come in. I had to look twice; Angel’s father was sitting between Salvatore and Frank Sinatra. “Where is she?” I said.

  “She’s gone back to Miami. I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “You know I love you, baby. This doesn’t have to be the end.”

  “Leave me alone, Angel.”

  “But baby ...”

  “Don’t call me that. You call her that.”

  He sat down, leaned right in. “What do you want me to do? He’s my father. This is my family. They’re relying on me, I have to do this. But you’re the one I love.”

  It wasn’t that he was so persuasive, it was that I wanted so badly to be persuaded. He put his hand over mine. I didn’t pull away straight away. He still loved me, I knew it. I knew it wasn’t over.

  “Meet me for coffee tomorrow. Let’s talk about this.”

  “No, Angel, I can’t.”

  “Please. I can’t sleep thinking about you, about us. I’ll be at La Mina tomorrow, eleven o’clock.” He looked up, saw my father coming out of the office, shaking hands with Meyer Lansky. “Please,” he said and then he went back to his table, to his family, to all the famous singers and mob bosses.

  Chapter 12

  Papi sent me home with Luis in the car. He normally stayed until the club closed at around three or four in the morning. After all that Doctor Mendes had said to him, he wasn’t going to break his routine.

  Almost midnight and it was still over ninety degrees. I wound down the window. The ocean breeze would usually cool off the midnight air, but tonight there wasn’t even a breath of wind. There were still people sitting outside their houses trying to cool themselves with paper fans. A large neon sign hung from the second floor of a factory down one of the side streets, illuminating almost the entire block. Some kids were playing baseball.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Angel. I kept going over everything in my mind, as I’d done ever since he told me about this other girl. He didn’t love her, he was marrying her because he had to, because his finally were making him do it. But what difference did that make in the end?

  I still couldn’t sleep when I got home.

  It’s love that brings us together

  It’s love that tears me apart

  I was still awake at four o’clock when I saw the Bel Air’s headlights pull into the drive and heard Papi’s shoes crunch on the gravel. He didn’t go straight to bed as he usually did. I heard him tell Luis to fetch him a rum. The shutters to my bedroom were open, and I could smell the cigar smoke drifting up from the courtyard. I slipped on a robe and went downstairs.

  “I’m sorry, cariña. Did I wake you?”

  “I was already awake.” There was a bottle of sweet Santiago rum on the table, three fingers in his glass. He smiled at me but I could see he was agitated, his foot tapping a tattoo on the marble tiles. I wondered what Lansky had said to him.

  “Your cigar smells great.”

  “I got two boxes of León Jimenes from Santo Domingo. They just came in today.” He watched the smoke drift on the sticky, damp air. “Something wrong?”

  “I’m worried a
bout you.”

  “Don’t worry about Doctor Mendes. He wants everyone to drink milk and go straight to bed after dinner. A man needs a cigar now and then. And this is my first rum today. I only had one glass of Santiago at the club, I swear.”

  “That was Meyer Lansky who came to the club, wasn’t it?”

  He smiled in a resigned sort of way. “Yes, that was Lansky.”

  “Does he still want to buy the club?”

  “He just wants the salon, wants to put a casino in there. I get twenty percent of the take.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him no. I’m sick of these guys, they think they own Havana.”

  “Don’t they?”

  He gave me a look, knowing I never talked about these things, perhaps he was wondering if his daughter was finally growing up. “You know Batista’s sold them everything? It’s not enough they own all the hotels and the casinos, that you can’t go into bar or a bodega without tripping over one of those damned traganíqueles, those slot machines. A million dollars a month and the president’s brother-in-law gets half of the take. Nice work if you can get it. They even run drugs through here to America. Every one of the girls you see standing on the street corners, they own a piece of them, too. Batista’s sold them the utilities, the banks, even the pension funds. So sure I told him no. Someone has to say no. Besides, I want my club just for music, some place people can go where they won’t lose every cent they have to these guys.”

  “What did he say, Papi?”

  “It’s okay, cariña, don’t worry about him.”

  “I’m not a little girl any more. Did he threaten you?”

  “Why would he do that? I just have a small place, I’m no competition.”

  “He did threaten you.”

  He shrugged. “It’s like he’s personally offended that someone somewhere is making a dollar without him seeing a part of it. They want to own you, these people. Well, he’s not owning me.” He dashed off his rum and slammed his glass on the table.

  I reached out and massaged the back of his neck. He smiled, laughing at himself. “Sorry, look at me, why am I getting mad at you?”

  “You’re not mad at me, I know that.”

  “You should get to bed.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll go up soon,” he said, but I smelled his cigar for a long time afterwards. He was still sitting there drinking as dawn broke over Havana, thinking what to do about Meyer Lansky. He knew you couldn’t say no to a man like that and expect that to be the end of it.

  Chapter 13

  Angel was waiting for me on the terrace of La Mina, a cafe on a side street leading from the Plaza de Armas. He smiled when he saw me, but he didn’t looked surprised. It was like he knew I would come even though I had said I wouldn’t.

  Ever since that night in the Left Bank I had been wondering why he wanted to see me, and I had rehearsed this meeting over and over in my head a hundred times. It had to be that he had changed his mind about marrying Esmeralda and he was going to stand up to his father at last.

  He would sit down with Señor Macheda and tell him he didn’t love Salvatore’s daughter, and from now on he was going to make his own decisions about his life. He would tell him how much we loved each other and that nothing would stand in our way.

  Then I would talk to my papi. I knew I could make him see sense, show him that he had misjudged Angel. When he broke off the engagement to Esmeralda Salvatore it would prove it to everyone, and he would see how we would only ever be happy with each other.

  La Mina looked out over the old central square where the colonists had kept their palaces in the days when the island belonged to the Spanish Imperial Crown. Tourists in loud shirts still flocked there with their Brownies and Hasselblads to take photographs and pretend to absorb the culture while they waited for the casinos and the nightclubs to open after dark. Beggars and ragged children harried them for a few coins.

  The man at the table next to us was reading a local newspaper, the Diario de la Marina. There were photographs of dead bodies on the front page, both of them students. Batista’s secret police, the SIM, had been at work.

  We sat in the shade of a weeping fig tree with our cortados. The air was hot and heavy again. There would be a downpour this afternoon.

  Despite the heat, Angel looked cool and confident; he wore a crisp white shirt, and there was not a hair out of place.

  We talked about everything, but nothing that mattered; Inocencia's performance at the club, the weather, Batista’s new offensive against the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Finally: “Does your father know you’re here?”

  I shook my head. “He thinks I’m at acting class.”

  A smirk. Angel was like my father, he never took my acting classes seriously. It was just something for me to do, in his eyes, keep me out of the house while he found me a good husband. He was an old school Latino in that way. He might criticize Angel’s father for arranging his son’s marriage to a mafia princess, but in his own way he wanted to dictate my life just the same way.

  But I had my own dreams. One day I was going to be a famous actress. Why not? Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Natalie Wood, they all had to come from somewhere. Marilyn Monroe hadn’t even had a proper family, she had been raised by her aunt - or was it her grandmother? - I had read it in Life magazine.

  And anyway, wasn’t I already a great actress? I acted the part of a virginal daughter, and that wasn’t easy to do in Havana. I wondered how many other girls - how many other women - felt like me, trying to be good daughters and mothers and wives but underneath feeling something very different.

  One day I would have to fight about what I was going to do with Papi, but that day wasn’t today. I didn’t know how I would make it all happen, but I believed that if you held a dream long enough, somehow it would come true.

  Angel looked across the square, where Luis was leaning against the Bel Air, watching us. “How can you trust him?”

  “I caught him stealing some of my mama’s jewelery. One of her brooches had already gone missing. If Papi ever found out, he could lose his job. Papi could even report him to the police, and he knows what that means. So we have an understanding.”

  He looked at me with new respect in his eyes. I may not have known much about politics, but I knew how the world worked.

  “So where’s your princess?” I asked him.

  “She’s in Miami. I may not see her again until the wedding.”

  I held my breath. “You’re really going through with this?”

  “I told you, I have no choice.”

  “You have a date?”

  “October.”

  October. I had just a few months to stop this from happening. I looked away so he wouldn’t see the pain in my eyes.

  “You know we’re moving to America?”

  “Papi told me.”

  “Señor Salvatore wants me to take over his real estate company.”

  “Why is your father running away?” I asked him. It made no sense to me. There were seven generations of Machedas in the cemetery at Colon, they had their own crypt, guarded by a huge stone angel. The house at Marianao had been in their family for over a century.

  He just shrugged his shoulders.

  “Men like Lansky and Salvatore wouldn’t be buying hotels here if they thought the government was going to lose the war against the rebels.”

  “I guess they think they can do business with the beards the same as they do with Batista.”

  “But I was reading the Diario de la Marina this morning,” I said, feeling very sophisticated for knowing something about the news. “The army just killed forty rebels yesterday and only lost five of their own soldiers. So how can they be losing?”

  “The Diario! You can’t believe that crap! They get all their news from the army. The rebels are well organized and well armed, they’ll win eventually.”

  “How can they be so well armed? Isn’t there an embargo?”

 
He gave her a patronising smile, more like the old Angel. “You don’t know anything, do you? Men like Garcia. Did you meet him? He was at the party.”

  “Reyes?”

  “He’s CIA. Couldn’t you smell it on him?”

  “But the Americans don’t want the rebels to win.”

  “Of course they don’t, but they’re hedging their bets in case they do. Just like my new father-in-law.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “If you want to know how the world is really run, baby, you should have dinner at our house, when my father and Salvatore have finished eating and light up their cigars. Then you wouldn’t look so wide-eyed. Salvatore thinks that whoever is in power, they’ll need the tourist dollars he brings in. He also thinks he can use Fidel to leverage Lansky out of Havana and run the whole show himself. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic or if he truly admired his new relative.

  “So Papi was right. You’re marrying a criminal.”

  “Who told you that? He’s a legitimate businessman,” he said, and looked sulky about what I’d said.

  “I don’t care about politics, Angel. I care about us.”

  “So do I, baby. You know I love you, don’t you?”

  “But you’re marrying another girl. You’re going to another country.”

  “But you’re all I care about.”

  “Then do something about it!”

  “What can I do?” He took my hand, held it so tight it hurt. “We could get away on our own for a little while. Go to the beach out of town, I know a little place.”

  “And do what?”

  An awkward smile. “You know.”

  I did know. He just wanted to screw me, have a bit of fun before he got married. Was this why he had brought me here, was this what he needed to talk to me about so badly?