The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  Allison, however, had seen me nearly tell her. "You know who that girl is!" she said. "I can see it in your face!"

  I picked up my coat, feeling the Derek Jeter ball in the pocket. "I better go."

  Allison didn't like my overly calm tone. "What's going on?"

  I didn't tell her, because I couldn't. What was going on? On my subway ride home, pressed between commuters headed downtown, I didn't know what to worry about more, H.J., or Marceno, or Sally Cowles. It made for a jangled journey, and only a block away from my apartment, hunched against the morning's cold, did I remember my lunch with Dan Tuthill that day. He was a connection to my old life, one I wanted to keep. I'd take a long shower, pull myself together, and at lunch subtly pump Tuthill for possible job leads. I quickened my pace, and as I did I saw an old man pass by on the sidewalk wearing a spectacular red silk tie that looked a great deal like the one Judith had given to me many Christmases past, back when I didn't move dead men in the night or sleep with women addicted to psychedelic fish flesh. The man lurched along in an army jacket and a wool cap, a certain triumphant energy in his eyes, as if he had stuffed his pockets with contraband, and the incongruity of the red silk tie should have warned me that, indeed, this was what had happened.

  When I turned the corner I saw a swarm of homeless people, office boys, and garment workers in front of my building, several fighting over a pile of junk in the street. Someone had pulled a car up and was shoveling clothes and other household items into the trunk. I got closer. The stuff looked like— like my stuff. I glanced up at my apartment window. It was shattered, frame and all.

  I broke into a run and flew into my building and up the stairs. On the third floor, I found my apartment door ajar, ripped off one hinge, the lock splintered. The sight was so improbable that I thought I'd entered the wrong apartment. They— whoever they were— had emptied the place, literally thrown everything I owned out of the two windows: the bed, the tables, the chairs, the clothes, the pots and pans, my old tennis racquet, long unused, the bank account records, the checkbook, the divorce papers, the food in the refrigerator, just all of it, the bath towels, the books, pillows, the rug, the CDs, the cleanser under the sink, the stereo, the clean socks, all the cheap junk of an ever cheaper life. I checked the closets. Empty, not a coat hanger. I checked under the sink. Nothing. In the corner the radiator whistled as the steam rose in the building's pipes. Newly naked, the apartment was reduced to its essence: pathetic, dirty, small. A hole.

  But wait— they'd left one thing in the living room, with a certain sadistic flourish: a broom, propped casually against the wall. I edged to the window and looked out. My old belongings were strewn twenty yards down the sidewalk, into the gutter. Whatever had carried or bounced into the street proper had been run over many times by the belching delivery trucks that serviced the block.

  In the bedroom, on the wall where my bed used to be, red-spray-paint letters looped two feet high: GIVE ME WHAT I WANT. I collapsed to one knee, staggered by my predicament.

  "Nobody saw them," came a voice behind me. It was the kindly and ineffectual super. He was holding a handful of envelopes. "Well, they saw it was a couple of guys, that's all."

  "White guys? Black guys?"

  "Like I said, nobody saw them." He swung his eyes around the bare walls. "I called the police, though who knows when they show up."

  He held up the envelopes. "They broke into your mailbox, too. You expecting something?"

  I shook my head, dazed by the whole event.

  "You, uh—" He studied me with the intent to get to the bottom of the problem. "So you know why they come do this to you? You know who these guys are? The police are going to have a lot of questions." He stared at me meaningfully, in the manner of a man who has already seen far too many things in his time— bodies drained of blood in bathtubs, widows curled stiffly in their beds, kitchens set afire, drunks insensate on the stairs. "I don't know who is in the wrong, don't know if it's them or if it's you. I don't know if you did something to make some peoples mad at you, if they're going to come back, okay?"

  "I see what you mean," I said.

  "So I brought you your mail, just in case, you know—"

  "In case I felt like not being here for a while."

  "You got it, yes."

  "I'll pay for the door, the window, all that."

  He nodded, unmollified, and his voice found his genuine mood: "Why don't you get out, Mr. Wyeth? I mean now. We don't need problems here. This building is full of peaceful people."

  "I didn't—"

  "The police are coming, Mr. Wyeth. They will have some questions for you."

  I took the mail from him, jammed it in my coat pocket, and hit the stairs. Outside, I saw a man holding a picture frame— Timothy in his baseball uniform, bat cocked on his shoulder, a happy grin on his face.

  "Give me that," I said. "That's my son."

  "Fuck you, Slim."

  "This is all my stuff!" I hollered.

  "Not no more."

  "Give me the picture."

  He started to rip apart the frame and I picked up what used to be the leg of my kitchen table. "You can have all this stuff," I announced, sweeping my hands at the clothes and shoes and kitchen chairs, all of it. "Just let me have the picture of my son!"

  "Put down the stick."

  "No," I said.

  "I'm not giving you the fucking—"

  Dead Herschel on a tractor, the mysterious Jay Rainey, the disturbing nocturnal activities of Allison— I swung the table leg in frustration at all of them, catching the man in the shoulder. He howled in fury.

  "I'm kill you, you fuck!"

  "No you're not!" I snarled, foolish beyond any past history of myself. "I'm going to hit you until you give me that picture, okay? Ready?" I swung the table leg like a bat. "Right in the head, ready?"

  He flung the photo to the ground, cracking the glass. I snatched it up. I wanted to poke through the trash for my checkbook or more photos of Timothy, but a police car turned the corner of the block. I slipped down the street, not much more than a vagrant now, hunted and alone.

  * * *

  I was a block from the Harvard Club, on my way to lunch in a new shirt, when I figured out who to call. Martha Hallock.

  "Not you again?" she said. "The Grand Inquisitor?"

  "Jay's in real trouble, Martha. I'm trying to help him."

  "This I doubt."

  "He's got people breathing down his neck, Martha, and I can't reach him." I tried to drain the fury and fear out of my voice. "You had something to do with the deal, didn't you? These people are putting a lot of pressure on him now. And me. We need to—"

  "I'm afraid you're on your own."

  "Thank you," I said, adding, "you fucking old witch."

  There was no response, just a series of wheezy, shallow breaths. Finally Martha's voice returned, no longer defiant, but rather somehow burdened. "How much trouble is he in?"

  "A lot," I said. "And I don't even know where he is."

  "Well, neither do I."

  "But you could tell me what I'm dealing with here."

  "I could—"

  "But?"

  "— but I don't have my broomstick."

  "Broomstick?"

  "Yes, the fucking old witch wants to come talk to the rude Manhattan lawyer but doesn't have a broomstick. However, the fucking old witch could take the 10 a.m. bus into the city tomorrow, I guess."

  "The rude Manhattan lawyer would be honored."

  "The old witch is fat and unstable on her feet," Martha continued, "and will need assistance."

  "Not to worry. Would she like a nice meal as well?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "How about lunch in a great old steakhouse?"

  "Swell beans, as we used to say when I was young, back in the seventeenth century."

  "I guess witches live a long time."

  "Too long, Mr. Wyeth, that's the problem." She hung up.

  * * *

  Now I stood outside the
Harvard Club, not quite able to step inside. A cold Manhattan rain, the kind that promises you nothing but misery, blew in sheets across the avenue, smattering the building. I saw Dan Tuthill waiting for me in the anteroom near the coat check, rocking on his heels, inspecting the cuffs of his shirt, and impossibly, looking a little fatter than two days before. I stepped inside and he shook my hand. We headed straight to the dining room, where we were shown to a table. After we ordered, I asked, "How's Mindy?"

  "She's fine. I mean, you know how it was with me…" Dan sighed. "Things are, well, we've got the kids, I always say."

  "How's the lawyerly life then?"

  "The usual. Pimps and maggots."

  "Which are you?"

  "I go back and forth— as necessary."

  "What about Kirmer, my old pal?"

  His smile dropped. "Kirmer? He's running the place, Bill."

  "What about—?"

  "All those guys? Nah, gone. He mowed down every one of them. Tied them up with phone wire and threw them in the river." He smiled. "Everything's different, Bill, the secretaries, the ways things are organized. I feel like a dinosaur and I'm forty-four!" He smiled up at the waiter. "Scotch on the rocks, double." He looked back at me. "And I don't like the way the wind is blowing. You have to have a thousand attorneys on staff these days to compete! The business is so global, so complex. All these Indian kids who passed the bar in New York and Bombay and have a master's degree in computer systems or bioengineering. They're actually smarter than you or me, Bill, that's the honest fucking truth. So the firm is going to go in directions that a lot of the old guys can't go."

  "But you're set, right?"

  "They have to buy me out if I leave, everything, even buy my shoes." We sat there, Dan paddling his soup with his spoon to make the steam rise. "Heard you weren't doing much," he said softly.

  "Me?" I said. "No."

  "Not even a little work?"

  "A little. But very little."

  "You into something else?"

  I shook my head.

  "What they did to you was fucking criminal, Bill."

  I shrugged. "They had good lawyers."

  "Yeah." Dan leaned closer. "So, listen," he said, "I'm going to tell Kirmer to take his hand out of my ass."

  "Leave?"

  "Leave? Eject, pal. Let those fuckers rot in their own gravy. I got some bucks set aside, I got my partnership share coming to me, and I've got Mindy's father."

  "I don't get it."

  Dan sat back and rubbed his chest, which meant, I remembered, that he had a story to tell. "Well, you know I'm a bad guy, I slink around."

  "I always figured," I said.

  "You, however, always kept your whistle clean."

  "I'm a conformist," I said. "Dull as dishwater."

  He grunted.

  "Anyway, Mindy's dad."

  He was eager to talk about it, I could see. "It's a crazy thing, Bill. Something you'd never expect. Mindy's dad calls me up three weeks ago, says he wants to play golf. I say okay, and so we go out to the National in East Hampton. Beautiful. He's a pretty distinguished guy, made a mint in the seventies with the airlines. He's got to be worth like two hundred million bucks. Can live off the interest of the interest."

  "Does some of it go to Mindy?"

  "Yeah, someday, but this guy's going to live till he's ninety, minimum. His resting pulse is fifty-four, blood pressure ninety-four over seventy."

  "Nice guy?"

  "No. Not at all. A bastard. A manipulator. Doesn't have enough to do with himself. Wife died ten years ago, and now he has this beautiful Japanese lady who lives with him. There's Japanese stuff all over the house. Bamboo rugs, jade things. Plus fish and rice every night. He looks great, looks relaxed. She takes care of everything, is my bet. That whole thing about the compliant Asian woman is a bunch of shit. She's the one in control. He's given up control."

  "Well, he still controls two hundred million bucks."

  "So we play a couple of holes. I keep waiting. Nothing. He's playing well, me, nothing. I'm all over the place."

  "Nervous."

  "Totally. So there's a bench near the sixth tee. He says let's have a seat."

  "This was it."

  "Yep." Dan nodded as the entrée arrived. "We sit down. He takes off his golf glove and puts it on my knee. Says, Listen, I know you're fucking another woman besides my daughter, maybe even more than one."

  "He use that word?"

  "Yes, fucking, which is a bad sign, of course. Because it's angry."

  I agreed. "Visceral."

  "I'm thinking, Oh no, he's angry, he's going to hit me with his seven iron. He says, Don't ask how I know, but I do. The world's a small place."

  "So were you?" I asked.

  Dan raised his palm. "I'm going to plead the Fifth Amendment, senator."

  "Fine."

  "So then he says, I know Mindy is a pain. I raised her. I know what she's like. But you can't leave her. I'm just about crapping in my pants at this point. I say, Okay. He says, No, I really mean it. I know she's gotten overweight. Actually he said fat. He used that word, about his daughter! I sort of waved my hands, you know, it's no big deal. I'm fat, too, of course. But she has gotten fat. Really fat. Purposefully fat, even. I mean, Bill, it creates a copulatory impediment. A sexual handicap. The only thing that works, frankly, is from behind."

  I put my hands up in front of me. "Hey, I'm not asking you to tell me this— not that it's not incredibly fascinating."

  "Don't worry, this goes somewhere. It connects to your future, in fact."

  "The sexual position you use with your obese wife impinges on my future?"

  "Well, in a manner of speaking. Just listen. So, Mindy's father looks at me and says—"

  At that moment my phone rang.

  "Quick, get it." Dan was irritated. "They don't like that here."

  "Martha?" I answered, taking a guess. "You change your mind?"

  "Yo, fuckwango!" came a male voice. "You got the wrong number!"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Hey, I'm looking for this guy, he gave me this number. In Brooklyn."

  Dan was watching me.

  "Is this Helmo?" I asked.

  "Yeah. I got that address for you, the one we was talking about? Rainey shows up again this morning, swung the bat for a hour. I followed him home. I want my three hundred bucks."

  "What's the address?"

  "Who you think I am?" he hollered in my ear. "Give me the three hundred first!"

  "Let's meet," I suggested.

  "Half hour in front of the batting cages."

  "I can't do that."

  "What the fuck?"

  I worried Dan could hear the voice in my ear. "How about three this afternoon?"

  "Be there. Or I'm telling Rainey about you."

  I put the phone away.

  "Who was it?" asked Dan.

  "Some guy who'll probably double-cross me."

  He nodded flatly. "Okay, so where was I? So Mindy's father, right. We're on the bench near the sixth tee. And he says, I know everything that you are or will be thinking right now. I know it. So I'm sitting there, I'm shish kabob. I'm cooked son-in-law. Then he says, I understand who you are."

  "What?"

  Dan nodded vigorously, mouth full of food. "He says I understand who you are. Then he says, But you can't leave her. I say, I have no plans to leave her, it would hurt the kids too much. He's not fooled. He says he's heard twenty or thirty of his friends say the same thing over the years. They always leave their wives anyway, soon as the kids are out of the house. Mindy will never leave you, he says. She doesn't have it in her, even if she wanted to. She's weak. That's true. Plus, he says, plus she loves you too much, not to mention the kids. I feel like a pig when he says this. He's right, of course, Mindy with her moon eyes, mooning after me, seeing if I'm happy, seeing if I have a drink. She'll do anything for me, Bill, suck my freaking toes, anything… which I hate, Of course! She's lost all her self-respect, she just wants to be loved,
filled up, like the new four-hundred-and-fifty-gallon oil tank I got in the basement in case of shortages. Huge, extra capacity! Mindy's like that, she lies there in bed with her fat legs out and calls to me, like, Oh just please come love me, please, please, waving her arms and moaning, Oh come tell me everything is okay. And it sort of breaks my heart but also sort of makes me hate her." Here Dan paused, eyes narrowing, mouth an evil little smile. "I like those thin girls who are tough cases, man— the sly, mean ones who you got to crack open."