The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  She was already shaking her head. "Naw, he was out there five or six days before. He was finished, because Herschel was making applesauce that day. He go picking up the grass apples in November and put them in the cellar and he always start making his sauce after the fieldwork done for the winter. That Herschel, see, I know him my whole life. I know the man. He had habits. He was done in the field! He had five bushels of apples on the kitchen counter in the morning, he had his paring knife and board, he turned on the sports, he wasn't planning on doing no bulldozing in no snowstorm."

  Jay shook his head, ready to disagree. "But I guess he wasn't through, not if he was on the bulldozer. I hadn't been out there in a week or—"

  "I talked to him about that!" Mrs. Jones shrieked. "He said you kept calling him and saying it was important it get done by such and such a time, and he was sick one of those days and he took himself out there anyway, even though I told him he was sick. But that was almost a week ago, Jay Rainey! He was all done with his work! Yesterday he wash his apples and then go down in the cellar and say I need me some more jars and then he goes out driving and then the next thing I know he ain't coming home. And it gets later and later and we is worried sick! Then we get a call at four in the morning that he's dead! On a bulldozer! I don't know why he was out there. But the way I look at it, if he was on that thing, he was working for you."

  "But if he'd already—" Jay began, then stopped, knowing he was arguing against the memory of a dead man. "All that's done. We'll find an acceptable settlement."

  It was a standoff. "Mrs. Jones," I asked, "just out of curiosity, what game was on the TV? The Knicks?"

  She looked at Jay. "You better get yourself a new lawyer."

  "What? Why?"

  "He's putting things in my mouth."

  "What?"

  "Herschel always watching that Tiger Woods hit the ball far."

  One of the winter golf tournaments, in the early rounds. "I see my mistake."

  "You do?"

  "I thought this was happening at night," I said.

  "Herschel ain't going out to bulldoze at night! You think he's crazy? This was after lunch." Mrs. Jones looked from Jay to me and back again in frustration. "Why we talking about this? I'm going tell those boys you said you'd pay the family that money, Jay Rainey. I'm going tell them you said you was happy to pay it! I'm going tell them you thought that was a good number, that was a fair number! How you feel real bad about Herschel. Yes, that's what I'm do! They expecting a call this morning. They watching closely! They know this is your new building, 'cause I told them. Poppy told me the number and I told them. So you see? I'm going tell them you said you'd pay! I think they'll take it. But I can't be sure. I can't control them boys no more, Jay Rainey. They wild now! They go around with their girls and cars and whatnot, it's out of my hands." She rebuttoned the top button of her coat and yanked her gloves tight. "I'll be going, then."

  She said nothing more, turned briskly, and picked her way along the snowy sidewalk. I turned back to Jay. "That little old lady just shook you down."

  Jay watched her go. "I've got to do something for them. But I can't pay off Herschel's whole life. He was just supposed to grade the roadbed, maybe dump some gravel in the holes. I paid him ahead of time, I told him to do it when the weather was warm, because the bulldozer works better then, anyway. I was sure he was done. It wasn't a big job."

  "What was he doing too close to the edge?"

  "Don't know. I couldn't tell what he was doing because it was all covered with snow. And hell, why was the dozer left in reverse? Don't worry about it, okay? It's my problem."

  I was glad to hear this.

  Jay asked, "What did you think of Cowles, the guy upstairs?"

  "Good guy, I guess."

  "You see the family pictures? The first wife was beautiful," he said. "I think he loved her very much."

  It was a strangely sympathetic thing for him to say, and we stood there in a sudden, not uncomfortable silence. Men sometimes make friends this way, I think. They decide quickly. Jay gazed into his hands, then looked away. There was something vulnerable and temporary about the moment, and I was attentive to it, for a man, let us agree, is a kind of shelled animal. There is the hardened surface he presents to the world, the face and the words and the behavior, but very often these do not correlate very well with the being inside the shell. By hardened I mean coherent, deflective of attack, and capable of being recognized by others; I don't mean unchangeable— quite the opposite, in fact. But the shell is always there, growing outward from within, flaking and breaking away, and the quivering wet stuff inside remains largely hidden. Appearances are not deceiving so much as incomplete. What you see is what you get, but what you don't see is also what you get. For a moment Jay seemed unshelled, disinterested in protecting himself from my scrutiny or judgment.

  "Yeah, I think he was crazy about her," he repeated. "You have one like that, a woman who just haunts you?"

  "I was married."

  "Yeah?"

  "She left."

  "You said you had a son."

  "Yes. I haven't seen him in—" I couldn't finish the sentence.

  Jay opened his mouth but said nothing. In contrast to his behavior thirty minutes earlier, he seemed tired or discouraged, deflated really, and it occurred to me that this was now the third time I'd seen such a cycle in less than a day; the first had been in the Havana Room, when he was up, then outside the steakhouse, when he was down; the second had been while he was recovering the bulldozer, up, and the drive back into the city, down.

  "You all right?" I asked.

  "Sure." He rose to his feet. "Here." He handed me a slip of paper with an uptown address on it. "This is the place for dinner."

  "For what?"

  "To meet with this guy for me tonight. Six p.m. The wine guy from Chile."

  "What's his name?"

  "Marceno, something like that."

  "Why can't you do it, anyway?" I asked. "This sounds pretty important."

  "I have another engagement."

  "More important than this?"

  Jay didn't meet my eyes. "Yes, actually."

  * * *

  Maybe I would do it, maybe not. Maybe it would be wise to talk to Allison first. And maybe I wanted to talk with her anyway. I found a cab going uptown, told the driver the address of the steakhouse, slinging it at him through the news radio chatter. He grunted, and clunked the car into drive. Outside, rain began to slather against the windows, a sudden dark wintry emptying of the sky, and I settled back in my seat as lower Manhattan blurred past; it was as if I were taxiing through the torrent of meaningless data from everywhere, able to discern every info-droplet but removed from their collective chill. The thought provoked me to inspect the piece of paper Jay had given me. He'd written the restaurant address in slanting box letters, but this was not what intrigued me. The slip had apparently been torn from some kind of business stationery, for on the reverse was printed SAFETY, RELIABILITY, AND PROMPT DE— What did Jay need or use that was safe, reliable, and required prompt delivery?

  Fifteen minutes later I was sitting at Table 17 and looking at the daily soup specials.

  Allison came over after I'd been served, carrying her clipboard. "Hey, mister backroom lawyer." She let her finger touch my shoulder and stood close to me. "So, what did you boys do last night?" she asked.

  "Didn't Jay call you today?"

  "Not yet." She shrugged. "So—?"

  "It's his business, actually," I said.

  "Come on, you can tell me."

  "We went out and looked at his land."

  "That's all?"

  I lifted my hands. "That's it."

  Allison didn't like my terse answer. "When did you get home?"

  "He dropped me off at my place close to five," I said. "Now, listen, I want you to sign me up for the Havana Room. Or whatever you do. Get me in there."

  She looked around to see that no one was listening. "I will. I told you I will."

&n
bsp; "When's the next time?"

  "It's irregular. You know that by now."

  "Once every week or two, I've noticed."

  "Whenever Ha is ready."

  "Why does it depend on Ha?"

  "Why? Because Ha, unbeknownst to the likes of you, is an artist."

  "An artist? Doing what?"

  "You'll find out, okay?"

  I remembered him unrolling the folded white cloth, the gleaming instrument inside. "By the way, Frank Sinatra never owned this place, not in his name, anyway."

  "Oh, I know. Lipper just says that. You looked it up?"

  "I did, yes."

  "Lipper is one of the great old liars, really."

  "You know, he doesn't own the building, either."

  "Sure he does," Allison said.

  "No, actually, he doesn't."

  "He owns the building, Bill. I know it."

  "No, it's some public company. I'm sure he has a long-term lease with them."

  "So Lipper rents the place?"

  "Looks that way."

  She sighed. "You know, I've asked him to give me a percentage of the restaurant's profits and he won't. And you know what?" She leaned forward, her teeth tight against her bottom lip. "This is my restaurant. I run it, I make it work. It really is mine, Bill. I possess it, you know? Lipper doesn't do anything. The bookkeeper sends him some papers a few times a month, and he comes in here with his nurse. I'm the one who is killing myself for him."

  One of the waiters beckoned her.

  "I think we might have a fish problem," she said. "I'll be back."

  I watched her go. The question of who owns property is always interesting; here was a situation in which a building had a legal owner, a company, and someone else, Lipper, who claimed to be its public owner, and yet another person, Allison, who claimed to be its moral owner. Things often work this way, though; anyone who has practiced real estate law is soon conveyed into a realm of human affairs where the pressures behind decisions are often enormous, and include death, divorce, illness, stupidity, greed, sexual indiscretion, grief— everything. Whatever is in the human spirit becomes expressed through bricks and mortar, which is also to say there's always a story. I remember in my first year in the practice a short Puerto Rican man came to me. He looked ill used by life, yet had been able to find a decent shirt, though no tie. He'd been shunted off to me by the partners and senior associates as not worth their billable time; I made the same assumption. But within a minute I knew myself to be wrong. He was coming to me, he said, and not a local lawyer in Queens, because he wanted his affairs handled quietly and correctly. He wanted, it remained unsaid, the cultural protection of a midtown law firm loaded with Jews and WASPs. He was dying of prostate cancer and had to proceed expeditiously. He owned three apartment buildings, a car-painting business, a garage, a septic tank–cleaning company on Long Island, a half interest in a gasoline station, and a number of lesser properties. He had come to the United States in 1962 and gotten a job as a union painter. "Three years I was here and then I ask my friend who owns a delicatessen what do you do with your money, and he say I buy bricks. I say why? And he say because bricks, they always grow. Bricks grow. Money, it does not grow like bricks."

  Now that he was dying, he had to dispose of his properties before his family started to argue over them, which would lead to the erosion of their value. Equally important, he had fathered four children by three women outside his marriage. His wife didn't know of any of the women, and none of the women knew of each other. One of these liaisons, he confessed between coughs, "back when I was young— you know, guapo— with good hair," had been with a Rockette showgirl thirty years prior who had since been married and divorced twice and was living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. "Oh, man," he smiled, eyes suddenly bright with the memory, "could that girl fuck. She practically broke my penises." Another woman had involved a longer relationship. Their child had been born with a heart problem and had to avoid strenuous activity. She'd uncomplainingly taken care of him for fifteen years, my client said. Then he started to cry. "He never threw a ball, never swam at the beach." He'd arranged, he said, for a cousin of his to marry the woman and be a father for the boy. Surprisingly, it had worked out. "That was the best thing I ever do in my life," he said. He wanted to sell off his properties to provide for his love children. The properties, he thought, might total ten or twelve million dollars. I sat there, a smug twenty-five-year-old who still thought law was what they taught you in law school, and said I'd look into it. Which I did. The properties were worth nineteen million dollars, and my client died two weeks after the papers were finished. He signed them while on a respirator and between morphine doses.

  Or there was the case of the billionaire real estate developer who bought one of the fancy old hotels near the Public Library and spent $116 million rehabilitating it so that he could wheel his mother inside and tell her that it belonged to him. His whole career, successful as it was, had been to prove himself to his mother. All this was conveyed to me by his statuesque wife, on a party boat cruising Long Island Sound. Her breasts were perfect nose-cones of flesh yet suspiciously real-looking, too. She was his third wife, and she knew she had a couple of years to go before she was traded in. I saw in her a good but weak person whose beauty had been debilitating, for it had attracted only men who wished to conquer her. Finishing her drink, she suddenly tossed her ice and lime wedge into the ocean, then the glass too, and turned to me, face beautiful, eyes bitter, and said, "All because of his mother, whom he hates!" I'd just nodded. "Why doesn't he want some children?" she asked. "That's all I want." She was removed and replaced within a year, and when the hotel's renovation was complete, I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony and noticed— how could I not— that the developer's mother was asleep in her padded armchair, mouth open, dentures dry in the air, cane nestled between her bony knees.

  Now Allison came back to me, her hips swaying. "Fish," she said. "You'd think they'd be easy! Somebody catches them, somebody buys them, somebody cooks them." She slumped in the chair. "Maybe Ha should look at them for me."

  "Why should Ha look at the fish?"

  "He knows a lot about them."

  But this wasn't of interest; I was worried about the night before. "Allison, what else can you tell me about Jay? Where does he work, that kind of thing?"

  She took a breath, let it out. "I don't know where he works."

  "He's never discussed it?"

  "I think he said he was in the construction business."

  "When you call him, during the day, where do you call?"

  She smiled a sick little smile. "I don't call."

  "You don't call him?"

  "No. Isn't that funny?"

  "He calls you?"

  "Yes."

  "Have you ever seen his place?"

  "No."

  "Do you know where he lives?"

  "No."

  "You have any number for him?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "It's embarrassing. He won't give it to me."

  "No home phone?"

  "No."

  "No cell phone, or business phone? I'm pretty sure he has a cell phone."

  Allison doodled on the edge of her clipboard. "I worry that he doesn't really like me, sometimes."

  "Why? Just because he won't tell you anything about himself? You search on the Internet?"

  "Of course. Nothing."

  "He just calls you up and tells you to meet him?"

  "Basically."

  "What happened to all your tough single New York woman survival rules?"

  "I forgot them."

  "What do you two do? I'm trying to get a bead on this guy."

  "He calls me here. We meet at my place."

  "And then?"

  "Well, you know."

  "Just tell me."

  "Usually we you know, we have fun, and then I make him a bite to eat."

  "So this is not at night?"

  She wasn't expecting the question. "
Not usually."

  "When?"

  "When it's slow here in the afternoon, maybe three or four."

  "You ever go out to dinner?"

  "Not much," she admitted. "He says he wants to see me in my apartment."

  "And you put up with this because—"

  Here Allison bit her lip and looked down and then found a cigarette in her bag. I'd pushed pretty hard. But I pushed some more. "The visits don't last long, do they? I mean, maybe an hour or two."