The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  "Yeah," she said. "So?"

  "That's not that long for a date, a romantic arrangement."

  "You're telling me?"

  "Does he begin with a lot of energy and then end up very tired?"

  "Yes! That kind of happened last—" She didn't finish. Instead she looked up at a heavy man in a white uniform who had barged into the room.

  It was the restaurant's chef. "I canna have this!" he called. "Again the swordfish!"

  "You want me to look?" Allison asked.

  "It is garbage! A direct insult! He is not wholesaler, he is a crook! He is saying, Eat my shit, take my delicious shit and press it through your teeth! That is what he is saying!" He turned and left.

  Allison stood. "You want to see what I have to deal with today?"

  I followed her through the swinging door with the little window and past long preparation tables and swinging steel pots. A Mexican man was hosing down the floor. The chef waited for us, a headless fish three feet long resting on a wet drainboard in front of him. I would have said it was a yellowfin tuna. Someone had started to clean it.

  "I will not eat shit!" the chef sputtered. "Look!"

  The fish had been slit down the middle and he lifted up one half of the pink meat to reveal a milky, pencil-thick tube that snaked through the flesh. It looked about two feet long and recoiled wetly when touched.

  "Yeah, okay," said Allison. "I'll call him." She looked at me. "I have to deal with this."

  "Worms! Parasites!" cried the chef as I turned to leave. "I canna have them! No worms!" He took his cleaver and hacked the fish. We stepped back. "No— no worms!" He chopped at the red flesh, pulverizing it. "Get— your— fucking— fish— man— to— deliv— er— fish!"

  * * *

  Among Manhattan's many improbable rooms is what appears from inside to be a Kashmiri houseboat floating fifteen stories above Central Park South. Filled with pillows and fabrics and statues of Ganesh, the room is a mogul's private love-chamber in the sky, every surface decorated, sitar music drifting in and out of consciousness. From this view, the park is a great dark lake, with the taxi headlights tunneling crosstown beneath the trees like miniature submarines bound for the lighted apartment buildings on the far shore. The room's many candles flicker in the windows, creating the odd sense of muted explosions over the park.

  The room is in fact a small restaurant, only two tables deep, and it was here that I sat in my one good suit, fondling an ornate brass spoon, waiting for Marceno, the new owner of Jay Rainey's family farm. Across the table, saying nothing, sat a dark-eyed woman with a very small nose, pinched perfect by a surgeon, perfect and pointed and small. The nose accentuated the woman's beautiful and enormous mouth, a mouth that promised everything, promised itself as a cave of pleasure that would accept the most torrid urgencies, if only the mouth's owner were made comfortable. I had tried very hard not to look at the mouth as the woman introduced herself as Miss Allana, Mr. Marceno's New York associate. The name sounded like one of those soothingly synthetic names of cars or pharmaceuticals. Miss Allana spoke with a crisp South American accent and did not, I understood, see any reason to make further chitchat, instead sitting and staring into some imagined faraway place where— maid service included— low-rent mouth-oglers like myself were not admitted.

  "Ah, Mr. Rainey," came a voice behind me, and it was Marceno himself, a small man with a tanned face and dark eyebrows. As confident as he was rich, I thought. He set down his briefcase and shook my hand.

  "I'm afraid that I'm not Jay Rainey," I said, then introduced myself.

  Mr. Marceno smiled poisonously, dabbed his fingertips together. "Then you are the man who cost me so much money last night?"

  I could see that the sum was a trifle to him. "Yes."

  He waggled his eyebrows at Miss Allana, then returned his attention to me. "Perhaps I should have hired you instead of Mr. Gerzon."

  "I was just trying to protect the interests of my client."

  "Of course. And why is your client not coming?"

  "He had a sudden interruption."

  "I see." He nodded again at the woman. Her disinterest in the conversation was painfully erotic. "Yes, this can happen, yes. I am glad he sent his representative. Do you like the view, Miss Allana?"

  This seemed some sort of romantic code, for she nodded and the mouth smiled the slow, wet orifice-dilation of a sea creature that senses nourishment might be near.

  "Here is our problem, Mr. Wy-eth," began Marceno after we ordered dinner. "We bought the land that Mr. Rainey sold."

  "Well, he mostly swapped his land for your building."

  "Let me put it another way. The new owner of his land is a company called Voodoo LLC, yes? Very humorous, Voodoo."

  "Right."

  "We bought Voodoo LLC."

  "When?"

  "Prior to the exchange of the land."

  "Was the exchange one of the conditions of your purchase of Voodoo?"

  "Yes."

  "Why didn't you wait until the exchange was complete?"

  "It was not necessary. We knew the exchange would take place."

  I nodded. "So you bought the shell corporation that subsequently swapped its office building for a piece of land?"

  "Yes."

  I still didn't get it. "What do you know about Bongo Partners, which happens to be the listed owner of the Reade Street property?"

  Marceno leaned back. "It is not so complicated. Bongo owned the office building. They deeded the building into a new corporate entity called Voodoo. This happened only three days ago."

  "Which is why the deed change hasn't yet shown up downtown in the records."

  "Right. I see you checked."

  And I could see that he was being patient with me, that he had other matters to discuss. "Let me be sure that I have it right. Bongo Partners, formed by a bunch of British investors, starts out owning the Reade Street property. It's a regular commercial property investment. They deed it into a new corporate ownership called Voodoo, then sell Voodoo to your company. Then Voodoo, which you now own, swaps the building for an eighty-six-acre farm on the North Fork of Long Island."

  "Yes."

  "Pretty ridiculous, isn't it?"

  "Why?"

  "Why didn't you buy the land outright from Jay?"

  Marceno smiled with odd sadism and somehow I knew he thought me the fool. "Because, Mr. Wy-eth, your client would not sell it."

  "I don't understand."

  "He would not sell his land, he would only exchange it for that building."

  I wanted to look at the woman's mouth but it would have distracted me.

  "He wouldn't take dollars for the land?"

  "No, he had to have the building."

  "That building in particular?"

  "Yes. I frankly do not understand why he did the deal. The building is, well, just a little brick box. The land is forever. Grapevines are forever, Mr. Wy-eth. But then again, I am biased." He looked at Miss Allana. "I am a romantic, it is my flaw."

  She smiled and looked away.

  "There was probably some tax benefit," I thought aloud. "If he sold the land first, he would have triggered a capital gains tax—"

  "We looked into that," interrupted Marceno. "We figured that. We were even willing to make some kind of compensation for that."

  "What was the order of events?"

  "Pardon me?"

  "Who found whom first?"

  "We were looking to buy acreage," answered Marceno. "We found Mr. Rainey's land. Then our sales agent told us the land was not for sale, not exactly. That Mr. Rainey would only swap it for a certain building. This was very unusual. We were told to approach the owner of the building, which was, as you have determined, Bongo Partners. Of course they had never heard of us or of Mr. Rainey. They were amused. They might have been thinking about selling the building. So, okay, they were willing to sell. Our lawyers advised that they deed it into a new corporation that we would buy. There are certain tax advantages for us that way,
as well as liability protections. So we did that as fast as we could. We bought Voodoo contingent on our ability to swap the building for the land. It went through fine."

  "There was a hard-ass deadline for this deal."

  "We ordered Mr. Gerzon to get this deal finished, I will admit that. I don't know how he dealt with Mr. Rainey."

  Gerzon's pressure on Jay, in other words, had been real. "Why the big rush?"

  "Because we are very anxious to develop that property, Mr. Wy-eth. Every day counts when you plant grapes."

  "Do you have copies of these contracts?"

  He reached in his briefcase, flipped me a small stack of documents. "It's all there. Ownership of the Reade Street building passed from Bongo to Voodoo, then a day later to Mr. Rainey."

  "All this crazy legal paperwork because Rainey had to own that one particular building?"

  "Yes." And then, perhaps seeing my pensiveness, Marceno said, "Now that I have given you an explanation, perhaps you can give me one. But first, let me tell you a little about my family, Mr. Wy-eth. We have been in the wine business for almost two hundred years. We are located in the Llano del Maipo region, near Santiago. We have a very good Cabernet Sauvignon, the Pinot Noir, and the Merlot. We are starting the Syrah, which you would call Shiraz. This is what we do. We practice controlled vineyard management. Extensive pruning to curb vigor." He looked at Miss Allana. She smiled again and looked away. "We want concentration of the fruit. We are careful about how we treat the land and the people. We are very careful with herbicides and pesticides. We are very lucky. In Chile we do not have the phylloxera epidemic. We can use French vines on French roots. Not French vines grafted onto American roots, like you have in California. We have been very successful. But we would like to branch out a bit. My family has maintained several apartments in Manhattan for decades now, it is a city that we love. And now we find the North Fork of Long Island very intriguing. We have started to hear that some very fine Merlots are coming along. The bottles are expensive, but the market is catching up."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's still expensive to make wine there, yes. The land costs are high, the vines need three or four years before they can produce, another ten before they produce good wine. In the great historical regions of wine-making, the cost of the land, as well as of the vines, is more or less sunk. All of it was paid for so long ago that it's no longer a cost factor. Same thing happened in Napa and Sonoma. The land is paid for, the vines are in. As you know, great wine is in the grapes. And before that it is in the soil. There is only so much we can do in the winery. So then, where was I?"

  "You love to come to New York City," prompted Miss Allana, her voice throaty and moist. "You love to be here."

  "Yes. That is right. And I come and am hearing about the North Fork vineyards and naturally I am curious and ask my driver to take me out there and see the land and I come back with mud all over my shoes and maps and—!" He tempered himself. "It is spectacular. It is a special gift we are only just starting to understand. And the farm that we have just purchased or exchanged with Mr. Rainey is excellent, too. The location is very good because we find that, yes, on a statistical basis, there are about four more degree days, four more days of warm weather, in the fall than there are even fifteen miles to the east. This is important to get the grapes ready for harvest. Every extra degree day decreases our risk, increases our potential yield before the first frost. And there are about two inches more rain. Forty-four inches a year instead of forty-two. To make a truly great Merlot, you do not irrigate. You drop your extra fruit and then use what is left. It takes self-discipline. But that is how the French have done it for a thousand years. It is against the law to irrigate grapes in Bordeaux, did you know that?"

  He waited for an answer. "Uh, no," I said.

  "We looked at all the weather data, too. Only five days a year above ninety degrees Fahrenheit and less than one day per year below zero degrees, on a historical basis. No prolonged heat, no deep freezes that kill the roots. This is very good!" He nodded in excitement. "And the soil data is good. The soil is loam— porous, sandy, and friable. Very, very good. Some of the best in the world for growing grapes, did you know that? We have a soil laboratory in Chile, with eight thousand soil samples. Our soil is volcanic, very different. But we study all soil. We had our agronomist look at the site, and we did our own gradient calculations, yes? If the slope of the land is more than eleven degrees, we find that the water vapor lingers in the low areas and we don't get the drying of the leaves that we like. We can get fungus, we get terrible black rot. So grade of land is very important. We examined the whole area, Mr. Wy-eth. We looked at nine different large properties. Frankly there was one that we liked a little more but a French company bought it before we could. But Mr. Rainey's property was larger and slightly cheaper by the acre and so we decided to acquire his. Our broker, she let us know about it."

  "Hallock Properties?" I asked, remembering the sign on the field.

  "Yes." Marceno looked at Miss Allana, then smiled at me.

  I realized I'd just made a mistake.

  But he continued. "When we buy acreage, we like to enter the community on very good terms— that makes sense, yes? We want the local people to be glad that we came. We try to build relationships, we try to have people feel good that the Marceno family has arrived. After all, we hire local labor, rely on local merchants. We need goodwill."

  "Sounds reasonable."

  He leaned forward. "It is reasonable. It is also reasonable to suppose, Mr. Wy-eth, that when we buy a piece of land, yes, we expect that what we see is what we get."

  I said nothing, thinking, of course, of Herschel atop the bulldozer.

  "Do you understand me?"

  "So what did you see?"

  "We saw a lovely piece of farmland with good drainage fronting Long Island Sound, the kind of place where you could put in a wonderful winery and have a tasting center looking out over the ocean."

  "Isn't that what you got?"

  "We don't know what we got, Mr. Wy-eth. We did soil tests, but those are random. Yesterday after we signed the copies of the contract to buy Voodoo LLC, but before Mr. Gerzon finalized the deal last night, we took a drive out to look at the land. Somebody had been out there with a bulldozer."

  "A bulldozer?"

  "Yes, moving topsoil around. It looked to me like he was filling in a low area but it was starting to snow. I couldn't quite tell. But I could see the bulldozer tracks."

  "This was yesterday?"

  "I told you, yesterday afternoon, Wednesday."

  Yes, in the daylight, which matched what Mrs. Jones had said. "What time?"

  Marceno twisted his head. "Midafternoon, just after four o'clock. This wasn't just a few tracks, Mr. Wy-eth. I myself worked a bulldozer on our family vineyard when I was young. Someone had spent hours moving the soil around."

  The chronology wasn't quite clear, but it sounded as if Herschel had already gone over the cliff when Marceno had inspected the land. Marceno hadn't actually seen a bulldozer.

  "Mr. Wy-eth, I know what goes on in an agricultural operation. Soil gets moved around, holes get dug, this kind of thing. But this land had been undisturbed for a while. I myself had been over that property by foot six times already. And then, the day we are finishing the deal, I see bulldozer tracks everywhere. What does this mean, I think. Why are they moving earth? What are they hiding from us?"

  I didn't have an answer for him, of course, but it occurred to me then that whoever had moved the soil around might have timed his activity in respect not only to the falling darkness but also to the coming snowstorm. If he— Herschel, it seemed— had begun at, say, 1 p.m., and the snow had started to fall at 3 p.m., with darkness descending about ninety minutes after that, then the discoverability of the bulldozer work prior to the deal being done that night was shrinkingly brief. "What happened then?" I said vaguely.

  "It was getting dark and our driver said a bad storm of snow was coming and perhaps
we should try to get back to the city soon." He looked at the woman and said something in Spanish quickly. She blushed and turned away, her lips pressed together in amusement. I got part of it. Something along the lines of, When I'm done with this gringo idiot you and I will… "So I did not get enough time to look around."

  Right. He did not get enough time to see Herschel dead and frozen forty feet down the sea cliff.

  "Why didn't you stop the deal if you had a question about the land?"

  "I tried to call your client, but he was unresponsive. I called the real estate agent and she said if we stopped the deal, then another buyer was ready to step in. I didn't want to risk that. So I let the deal go ahead." He stared at me without blinking, his mouth sucked small with fury. "This morning my foreman tells me he finds new tracks and also potatoes in the snow. I am thinking I did not see potatoes in the snow yesterday afternoon, and they are in the snow the next morning?"