The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  I'd yanked an extra quarter million bucks from the universe for him only hours before and now he needed me to be a farmworker? But I was polite. "A pair of hands?"

  "Yeah, Poppy's are no good."

  I saw the door to the Havana Room closing. "Give me the number, I'll call you back."

  I walked the nine or ten steps across the foyer. The door was shut now. I tried the old porcelain handle. Nothing. The yellow card had been removed from the brass plate.

  "Closed," announced the maître d'.

  I felt cheated. "Hey, but it was open a second ago."

  "Yes," he said, not looking up from his reservation book. "It was."

  I tried the handle, shook the door. It was surprisingly firm, with no vibration to it, as if the handle were merely bolted to a wall.

  "Sir!" he called sharply.

  "I was just in there, I have food on the table!"

  "I'm sorry," he said, with no sympathy.

  "I was taken in there by Allison Sparks," I said.

  "Yes," he responded, "but you left. And the door is closed."

  "I don't get it," I protested.

  "I must ask you to move away from the door," he said.

  "It's not busy, it's not—"

  "Please, sir," he said, his voice ominous.

  Now the woman in the fur coat had the pay phone in both hands.

  I retrieved my coat and stepped outside into the cold, irritated and disappointed, watching the snow fall. Allison had said she'd be there in three minutes, but it was longer, more like ten. I noticed several potatoes in the gutter. The winter wind off Sixth Avenue slaps you around, sticks a cold finger down your collar, wakes you up. But it doesn't remind you that you are fallible and foolish. Finally a green sport utility truck pulled to the curb, flashing its lights, wipers pushing away the swirling snow. Allison jumped out wearing a big hooded coat and ran up to me in the snowy light outside the door. Her hair was not quite combed, her makeup smudged and forgotten, cheeks flushed.

  "I don't get this guy sometimes, I really don't."

  I glanced at Jay's shadow behind the snowy window of the truck cab. "I thought the evening was going so well, the real estate deal and everything."

  "It was. We were having a great time. He was fine ten minutes ago, fine."

  She didn't seem as drunk as she'd been on the phone and I wondered if it had been an advertisement of happiness. "What happened?"

  Allison leaned close to me, hunched in her coat. "Your phone call, Bill."

  "Did he say what the problem was?"

  "No, but he got upset after you called. I could see it."

  A blast of snow cut down the street and we huddled closer. "He wants me to drive out to the East End of Long Island with him."

  "Will you help him?" she asked. "I'm worried about him driving alone."

  "I was hoping you'd get me back into the Havana Room, see the circus trick or whatever goes on."

  She blinked at the snow in her eyes. "Who says it's a circus trick?"

  "What happens? Ha and the black woman do something?"

  Allison frowned in disgust. "It's real kinky, Bill, yeah." She checked her watch. "They must have started without me. Ha must have gone first."

  "I want to go back in."

  "If you've missed Ha's first part, then it won't be any good."

  "I don't understand."

  She nodded. "I'll get you back in, don't worry."

  "When?"

  "Another night. Soon." She glanced back at Jay's truck, its hazard lights blinking, as if waiting for me. "He says he's driving out there no matter what."

  She was appealing to me to help Jay for the second time that evening, and I could not help but hope that this commended me to her. I looked into Allison's face with frustration and unexpectedly sensed her own. The whole evening was a piece of unfinished sexual business to her. With the snow pattering softly on her hood, there she was, lungs and lips, eyes and breasts, and she wanted, she wanted very badly, she wanted him or me or it or everything, and that desire made me want her, too. "Please, Bill?" she whispered. "Will you help him?"

  "I should go home to bed. I'm tired."

  She studied me a moment. "You don't look tired."

  "I am. Tired and old."

  "Girls have been known to like old men," Allison said. "They find their wrinkles interesting."

  I thought of Judith and Wilson Doan, his strange eyes, standing in a black coat at his son's funeral. I thought of this and it reminded me of other things and I found myself thinking of Timothy in a Tuscan villa, kicking a soccer ball against an old stone wall by himself. I hoped that his stepfather was good to him, loved him, wasn't too caught up in how to spend three quarters of a billion dollars. I needed not to think about this, however, anything but this, and the prospect of a late night errand to Long Island had new diversionary value.

  "Okay," I muttered. "I'll do it."

  "Thank you."

  "But you'll get me back into the Havana Room?"

  "Promise."

  "I really want to see what—"

  "I know, yes. I promise, Bill."

  "Then it's a deal."

  "Please drive safely," she said. "For both of you." She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. "You'll come by tomorrow?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Good. I'd like that."

  And then Allison was gone, swirling through the door, the snow following her.

  * * *

  There was still time for me to open the truck's door and make awkward apologies to Jay, but I didn't. Instead I just stood there under the steakhouse's awning feeling the wind slap my cheeks. I've had reason since then to wonder why I resisted the correcting action, the prudent retreat. I was tired, and I should have gone to bed. Certainly I'd responded to Allison, sensed something genuine in her voice, some muted distress call perhaps. But the reason I walked through the gathering snow to Jay's truck is more than that, and it doesn't reflect well on me: I sensed animal weakness in Jay, and I wanted to find out what it was. To be more precise, I sensed a problem, and not necessarily the one that was worrying Poppy. I sensed edges and change and conflict. A real problem wanting a solution. A solution requires a stratagem, and a stratagem means a game. I'd once been good with problems and stratagems, as I'd proven earlier in the night, and something in me welcomed another challenge.

  In this I was a fool. I'd forgotten that any true game is played versus an opponent, or even two simultaneously, against the indifferent backdrop of chance. Who has won and who has lost is often difficult to know, or undecided, or, at the last, reversible. As Wilson Doan Sr. himself had learned, for one. Yes, I'd forgotten all this, and so I walked around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. Jay had on the same good coat and suit he'd been wearing a few hours earlier. He looked up at me, his eyes a little dull, I thought, his hands hanging on the steering wheel.

  "Really appreciate this," he breathed.

  I settled in, and noticed a baseball on the dash. I picked it up. A baseball always feels good in the hands. "Not what I expected to be doing tonight."

  "That makes both of us."

  The box of cash was behind his seat. "Sounded like you were having kind of a great drive with Allison. Sorry I interrupted."

  Most men would have smiled in reply, either in embarrassment or pride. But Jay blinked at the thought of it, lips closed. I had the distinct impression that Allison was not the kind of woman he preferred. He pointed to the glove compartment. "There's a little thing of pills in there. Would you hand it to me?"

  I opened the compartment, found an unmarked container.

  "Thanks." He shook out three pills and swallowed them. Then he slipped the container into his breast pocket.

  "You want me to drive?"

  "No, it's all right."

  And it was. By the time we'd crossed through the tunnel into Queens, he was sitting up straight and driving with crisp aggression.

  "Those pills are pretty good," I noted.

&n
bsp; "They are."

  "You all right?" I asked.

  "I'm fine, man, just tired."

  He wasn't interested in talking, so I let it rest. The Long Island Expressway, always a dragway of insane drivers, becomes genuinely otherworldly on a snowy night, and to stay with the traffic we popped up to eighty, flying east past the billboards and shopping centers and exit signs, Jay seemingly noticing none of them. His eyes showed no sign, in fact, that he'd inked a real estate deal that evening or had to break his celebration with Allison, and I found myself remembering the oddly deadened sadness I'd seen in his face when he'd embraced her. In the pin-light darkness of the truck, his mouth was set, his gaze fixed on the road, and I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I've met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch. Jay was like this. Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he'd better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him— the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream. Yes, let me say it again. Quiet men with dreams can be dangerous.

  The highway became more desolate as we passed the edge of Long Island's suburban sprawl and into the last thirty miles of farmland. Although far outside the eastern edge of Queens, we were still well within the city's dominion. The money on Long Island, tip to tip, is always, in some measure, New York City money, either coming from or going to. It has to be that way, because, except for potatoes and power boats and fresh fish, everything appearing on the island— every washing machine, every stick of lumber, every carton of orange juice— comes through the city on the way east. Eighty miles out, the island forks north and south, and with the South Fork already filled up with vacation houses and Hamptony attitudes, the North Fork was next; once off the highway we passed signs announcing new golf courses, condo construction, and wineries. I knew a bit about the land game. The idea, of course, is to get hold of an enormous piece of property, preferably with as little cash down as possible, subdivide it "tastefully," which is to say in such a way that it attracts wealthy buyers, and then sell out the whole thing. If the buyer plays cleverly, his leverage can be extraordinary.

  "You see what's going on out here," Jay muttered. "It's a gold rush."

  "Why did you decide to get rid of the land now?"

  "The time was right," he said cryptically.

  If able to be subdivided, a big piece of land like Jay's could be worth quite a bit more than he'd exchanged it for. Zoned at an acre per lot with greenbelt set-asides, a developer could still get perhaps seventy lots out of it, with twenty of them on the water. You'd have to drop in a million for water, roads, zoning applications, and sending the politicians to Bermuda, but even so, someone smart and energetic might be able to triple his money in five years. "You try to subdivide?" I asked.

  He shook his head silently, made a series of turns, then stopped in the darkness at a chained dirt road that headed directly toward Long Island Sound. He got out and left the chain on the ground. I noticed a real estate broker's sign: HALLOCK PROPERTIES. Jay pulled it up and flung it into the grass.

  "This the land?"

  "Yeah."

  "No longer yours, now."

  "Not technically, counselor," he said, sitting down again.

  "You gave Gerzon the key, I thought."

  "I kept a copy." He nosed the truck ahead. "Always keep a copy, you know?"

  The road passed through a stand of spruce trees, then opened up, wide to either side.

  Jay hunched close to the windshield. "Where is he?"

  I could see in the snowy dark that we were passing through an old farming operation. Massive outbuildings, a couple of abandoned tractors. Jay maneuvered around ruts and holes. "They haven't been keeping the road up."

  "You know this land?"

  "I grew up here, man."

  "Right here, on this land?"

  "Exactly," he said. "Hey, look for tracks."

  But I saw nothing. The land lay to either side of the road in wide flats. We passed irrigation engine sheds, piles of piping, three ancient trees in a line, leafless yet magestic. The snow slapped against the car.

  "The water is close?" I said.

  "Quarter mile."

  At the end of the road, a deep-bellied farm truck had pulled to the side, beyond which I could see the phosphorescent expanse of Long Island Sound. The truck was a big one, double sets of wheels on the rear, and about the size of a municipal garbage truck except that the container end was a steel trough filled high with potatoes. The truck also appeared to be missing its driver's door. At our approach a figure stepped out. He pulled his hat low and came straight up to Jay's side. It was Poppy, drinking coffee.

  "Where's Herschel?" yelled Jay.

  Poppy shook his head at the futility of the question. "Come on, it's bad."

  I felt sick at the sound of this. We got out and followed Poppy directly to the edge of the sea cliff.

  "Watch it there," said Jay, holding my shoulder. "It goes down two hundred feet."

  The wind was coming hard off the ocean and pushed up the face of the cliff, so that where we stood snow flew into our faces even as we looked down. Poppy pointed his light at two wide tracks that dropped straight off the cliff. "Went right over."

  Jay peered over as best he could. "Is he dead?"

  Poppy shrugged. "If he was working in daylight, then he's been there eight hours anyway." He kicked at the sand. "Fucking snow made it hard to see the edge, I guess."

  "When'd you find him?" Jay asked.

  "Maybe ten o'clock tonight."

  This made sense to me, for Poppy hadn't appeared in the Havana Room until after midnight.

  "Was he alive?" I asked in terror.

  "I don't know," snarled Poppy. "He could have been. But he wasn't moving."

  "You didn't go down there?"

  "No, no way. Not with my hands."

  "You call the police?" I said, shivering now.

  Poppy looked at Jay in fury, and despite Poppy's small size I took a step backward.

  "Bill, hang on," said Jay. He nodded at Poppy. "All right, so you didn't go down."

  "No way."

  I peered over, couldn't see much.

  "Don't get too close. The sand is shifty, there's no clean line."

  Contrary to my expectation, the drop was not sheer but gradual. I edged forward. "There!"

  Forty feet down the slope sat a bulldozer, treads right side down, held in place by a stand of leafless trees. A man lay sprawled in the cab. He didn't move. The machine appeared to have slid backward down the irregular slope and come to a stop undamaged. The big bucket on its front rested in the sand, and the hinged arm of the backhoe was tucked in behind the cab.

  Jay squinted into the snowing darkness. "Hey Bill, I got a legal question."

  "Yeah."

  "How easy is it to undo a real estate deal?"

  "If both parties agree, and the deed hasn't been recorded, easy."

  "If the guys from Voodoo saw a dead guy on their property tomorrow morning, could they undo the deal?"

  I thought for a moment. "Yes. They could say a crime may have been co
mmitted, that they bought under false pretenses. They could tie it up with a court order. They could try to stop payment, freeze accounts. They could do stuff."

  "I wouldn't get my building."

  "No," I said.