The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  "And once you knew he was in town?"

  "Cold certainty."

  I stared at him.

  "About finding Sally."

  "You bought his building."

  "I did."

  "Why?"

  His eyes went hard. "Curiosity."

  It was an unnerving answer, and I remembered Jay's ostensible friendliness when he'd been meeting Cowles in his office after buying the building. That performance was the height of fraudulence, I now realized, and furthermore, I remembered that Jay had allowed Cowles to negotiate for a lower rent.

  "Did you tap Cowles's phone?" I asked. "In the basement?"

  "That's what you would do? If you were me?"

  "Yes," I confessed.

  He nodded. "Sure. You splice into the phone box. Buy the hardware out of an electronics catalog."

  "And?"

  "It's boring stuff, mostly. But sometimes I hear Sally talking. Cowles and the new wife talk about the kids' schedules constantly, baby-sitter, birthday parties, school stuff, doctors' visits, you name it. The woman is a good mother, by the way. He married a good woman."

  Hearing this made me think of my own lost life with Judith and Timothy, and so his words had a doubled sadness for me; both of us, it seemed, were pathetic, emptied of everything but yearning. Yet Rainey and I were different, too. I felt it. And saw it, in the bright urgency in his eyes. Some aspect of Rainey's character was eluding me, not anything having to do with the old farm and what might be buried there, but a more essential element that was concentrating his focus, pushing him to do risky things like shadow Sally Cowles at basketball games and piano concerts.

  "So— that's why you bought the building, to listen to a few phone calls? I think it's more than that."

  He didn't answer. He didn't want to answer.

  "This isn't good, Jay."

  "I know what I'm doing," he said obliquely. "I think out every move."

  Ask another question, I thought, slide off the moment. "And Allison? This is why you started with her?"

  "Man, you are good." Jay smiled, releasing tension, and if it was not a malevolent smile, then nonetheless it had a kind of coldness in it that worried me. "It wasn't too hard, really. I pretended to be a buyer two floors above. The real estate attorney showed me around. But the place was a little too high, you can't see right. But the second time I was there I saw the elevator man delivering the mail. I saw her last name. It was the right floor. So I had the last name and the floor. Her name is in the phone book. A. Sparks. No other name listed. Probably single. I sort of bet myself that if she was under fifty I had a shot."

  "But you had to figure out who she was."

  Rainey laughed, but it was at my expense. "Doorman. Hundred bucks."

  "How'd he go for that?"

  "Told him I was a cop. Said it wasn't her I was checking out, it was one of her friends."

  "I have a feeling she's got a lot of guys going in and out of there, on an annual basis."

  "That's what the doorman said, too. Once he told me that, I knew I could do it. I watched her, saw she has breakfast in the same place a lot. It was easy. A good suit, sit there with the newspaper. Not too hard."

  "You two see each other a lot?"

  "Afternoons, mostly."

  Jay shrugged away the matter, and in his gesture I realized why Allison had fallen so easily for him; his indifference toward her was thrilling, somehow, and returned her to a more primitive part of herself, the position of a child with a stern father, perhaps. I wondered if she ate the fish with him as well, but this seemed unlikely, given how infrequently it was available.

  "So your health now?" I ventured.

  "You mean, how fast am I going?"

  "I know how fast you're going."

  "You do?"

  "I guessed earlier you're at thirty-five percent FEV."

  He smiled. "Pretty good."

  I shrugged.

  "But not good enough."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm at about twenty-four percent." He gave a little cough, as if to emphasize the point.

  "You're supposed to be in an oxygen tent."

  "Yeah, probably."

  "Well?"

  "I got things to do, Bill." He picked up the oxygen mask then, and, breathing its sweet stream, closed his eyes.

  He was, I suddenly understood, preparing to contact his daughter. His desire to see her, if only occasionally, had become the desire to know her, which itself had become the desire to talk with her. It was the organizing principle, the gravitational pole. The more Jay knew about Sally, the more he wanted to know. To hear her talk on the phone with Cowles must have been an exquisite torture to him. It's in the nature of men to want what they cannot have, but it must have seemed to him, with his daughter's voice piping innocently in his ear, that if he had come this far, then all things were possible. And maybe they were. Only that same evening, in the Steinway store, Jay had stood behind his daughter, fingers grazing her shoulders, looking down on her shiny combed hair; it was a kind of triumph, actually, it proved that he was not utterly disconnected from his former self, proved that part of his youth and vigor and own innocence lived on. That Sally at fourteen genuinely resembled Eliza Carmody at twenty must have been further irresistible torment for him, to see the past and the future simultaneously in his daughter's face. The girl's mother was lost, but here she was, a perfect child without her natural parents. How could he turn away from this? How could he not be drawn closer and closer to look and then choose to look longer? To cut off the simple powerful truth of the matter would constitute a death in itself, one that followed the death of Eliza and presaged Jay's own. And who could do that, who could not look at his own child? Many times I had fought off the desire to hop on a plane to the West Coast and drive a rental car right up into Judith's new mansion, wherever the fuck it was, crash through the garage, and race along the hallways to Timothy's bedroom and crush him in my arms. That I did not do this was proof of my own damnable weakness, and I realized now that Jay was teaching me something, that very moment, about what might be necessary to hold on to one's child. You had to be a little crazy, you had to be insanely devoted to the idea of redemption. I felt my own frozen yearning crack apart; I needed to have Timothy back, I needed him like I needed air, and I would get him back, no matter what.

  So I did not judge Jay harshly that evening, hearing his story, not at all. I was scared for him, but I admired the truthfulness of his intention. All of his manipulations and lies, the maze of his own devising, were in pursuit of the one good thing he could yet imagine for himself, the recognition that passes between father and child.

  "So," I ventured. "Where's all this go now?"

  "Simple." Jay dropped the mask from his face and found my eyes. "I'm dying, man."

  Nine

  "POTATOES!" Allison cried to me on the phone late the next morning. "All over the sidewalk in front of the steakhouse." I'd been lying in my hotel room bed, listening to the tape-hiss of my own head and wondering what to do about Jay, when her call came. "There's a huge green truck up on the sidewalk," she said. "A little old man is inside! And he won't come out. He says he knows Jay. He's drunk or something, says he has to talk to Jay right now. I told him I didn't know where he is, Bill!"

  "Is the truck missing a front door?"

  "I think so, yes."

  It was Poppy. "Can you put the guy on the phone?"

  "He won't get out of the truck. I'll take the phone to him."

  Which she did. I heard her carrying it outside, the fuzz of the wind cutting across the mouthpiece. "Poppy?" I said when she handed it to him.

  "Jay?"

  "No, it's Bill, his lawyer. You remember me."

  "I ain't talking to no shyster."

  "I'll be down there in a few minutes." It was only about ten blocks away. "Don't go anywhere."

  "You just bring Jay, just tell him I'm going to say what he don't want to hear, I can't take it no more…" His voice broke into a wretc
hed sob. "I'm sorry, it was never, I'm—"

  "Bill?" came Allison's voice. "He's crying."

  "Don't let him go anywhere. Take the keys."

  "Ha already did."

  I told her I'd be there soon, then called Marceno's New York office. Miss Allana answered.

  "Let me talk to Marceno," I told her.

  "Mr. Wy-eth," came his voice almost immediately. "So you have responded to my inquiries?"

  "Marceno, listen to me. Jay Rainey doesn't know what's buried on your land, and I don't, either. But I can tell you who does know, the little old man who worked on the farm."

  "The fellow named Poppy?"

  "Yes."

  A dismissive grunt. "We already asked him."

  "You personally?"

  "One of my representatives."

  "Who?"

  "That is confidential, Mr. Wy-eth."

  "If it was Martha Hallock, then I don't think you got the whole story."

  This bothered him, I could tell. "And why would that be?"

  "Because they are related."

  "Related?"

  "Poppy is Martha Hallock's nephew."

  "No one told me that."

  "Why would they?"

  "This man Poppy knows?"

  "He's here in town, at the steakhouse where we did this deal in the first place. He's looking for Jay Rainey and he's not going to find him. But he says he has something to tell him. So I'm going there right now. I suggest you show up, too."

  "I was expecting information to come from you or Jay Rainey."

  I stood at my window and watched the taxis edge down Fifth Avenue. "Poppy is there now. Right now, a few minutes from your offices. It's the best I can do, Marceno."

  "We will see."

  "Hey, you're the one with forty-two million bucks on the line, Marceno, not me."

  * * *

  I walked toward the steakhouse, listening to my phone ring in Jay's garage apartment. No answer. When we'd said goodbye the previous evening, he'd offered his hand to me in a gesture of friendship and apology and I had taken it willingly, sad for him, now that I understood the simple emotional logic behind his curious behaviors— all the man wanted was to find and know his daughter. On a Monday morning the city was busy, men and women climbing out of the subways ready to eat pressure and deadlines and phone calls. And the next day I'd be busy, too, finally. I'd report for work at Dan Tuthill's new firm, and from there I'd rent a new apartment— someplace with a real doorman who didn't let thugs up the stairs— and a few weeks later, Timothy would arrive, with Judith.

  A block away from the steakhouse, I saw Poppy's half-ton truck bumped up onto the sidewalk of Thirty-third Street. He'd knocked one of the evergreens over. The enormous ceramic pot had broken into a dozen pieces and the tree itself lay on its side, roots exposed to the cold. Ha was out on the sidewalk, picking up potatoes and throwing them back into the truck. The wind lifted what gray hair was left on his head.

  "Ha!" I called.

  He looked up and nodded. "Miss Allison friend."

  "Yes. She called me." I pointed at the truck. "You've got a little old man inside?"

  "Every Monday, close for lunch," Ha muttered. "But Ha work anyway. The man is in that truck."

  I saw a boot sticking out of the truck where the front door was supposed to be. The limp glove was still taped to the steering wheel. Poppy lay slumped across the front seat hugging a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

  "Poppy, you don't look too good."

  "I didn't tell them." He licked his lips in a daze. His face was swollen, as if he'd been punched a few times. "You see Jay, you say I didn't tell them."

  Allison slipped out the front door of the steakhouse, arms huddled tight, eyes concerned.

  "Who is he?"

  "This is Poppy. He used to work on Jay's farm."

  "Is he drunk?"

  "Yeah, I'm fucking drunk." Poppy rolled onto his back, exposing a belly of gray hair. "I'm a lot of things, I'm a drunk and beat up and I also got coffee in me." He vomited into the well of the seat. "Christ," he moaned.

  Allison stepped back from the truck. "What am I supposed to do here, call the police?"

  "Don't."

  "Why?"

  "The night that we did the real estate deal, this was the guy who came to the restaurant."

  She frowned. "I don't remember him, and believe me, I would."

  "You were out with Jay celebrating. He needed Jay to drive east to his land. Remember you asked me to go out there? That night we found an old black guy dead on a bulldozer. He'd worked on Jay's farm for years. The bulldozer had gone off the edge of the cliff. Poppy and Jay and I hauled it back up using this truck, in fact. Jay thought the old guy had a heart attack."

  "He did," bellowed Poppy. He pushed himself up and confronted us, his lips wet, nodding portentously, as if being questioned in a court of law. "He did, a fucking heart attack, plain and simple. I saw it with my own eyes. Nobody touched him."

  I pulled on his arm to get him up. "You told us you found him."

  "No, I saw him!" he growled. "I saw him die."

  "You kill him, Poppy, did you kill him somehow?"

  He seemed oddly fascinated by this question, distracted even, and didn't answer.

  "Sir, we take deliveries on Monday," said Allison. "You're blocking our way here. You're going to have to move."

  He didn't respond. I saw a bit of blood on his lip and bruising around his eye. "He needs to come inside, Allison. We can move the truck."

  Poppy nodded at this suggestion as if he'd heard it from a great distance. "I'm sick," he muttered. "I'm sick of it."

  Allison pulled me away from the cab. "Why didn't you tell me all this, Bill?"

  "Jay's got a lot of problems, Allison."

  She crossed her arms angrily. "Well, I figured that out."

  "No, I don't think you did."

  "You should have told me."

  "Allison, you asked me to help Jay. Remember?"

  She shrugged, holding herself tight.

  "A guy is coming here soon, I hope," I went on. "Poppy's going to tell him something, and then at least part of this trouble will be finished."

  "I don't understand."

  "There's a problem with the land Jay sold," I told her. "The buyer wants to know what it is. He's been threatening Jay and me."

  "You can't just drag all this into my steakhouse!"

  "Allison, you dragged it into your steakhouse, not me. You told Jay he could finish his real estate deal in the Havana Room. You started this. You thought you attracted him, you let him work you."

  "What do you mean?" She was figuring things quickly. "Is this about that woman named O, the woman he sees?"

  I shook my head, stunned by how little she knew. "There is no woman named O. Jay picked you out, for something else."

  "What?"

  It was too late not to explain. "I'm sorry to tell you this, Allison. It's not what you want to hear—"

  "Just tell me."

  So I did. "Jay picked you out. He figured out exactly where you lived, the floor, everything."

  "Why?"

  "He wanted to look across the street."

  She stared at me, not sure whether to be hurt or furious. "The living room window?"

  I glanced at Poppy, then back at her.

  "He was always at the window. We used to sit and talk. That's what we liked to do. It was sweet, you know?"

  I nodded again, slowly.

  "The girl?"

  "Yes."

  "Who is she?"

  I checked Poppy again. He looked cold, a little out of it, munching his mouth in rumination.

  "Who is she, Bill?"

  I turned back to Allison. "His fourteen-year-old daughter."

  She was a proud woman, Allison Sparks. She had a big job and an independent life, plenty of money, and a funny little drug habit, so basically she thought she knew the score, especially when it came to men, because, I supposed, she did not at heart trust them. And so here
was proof that her vanity and passion had hidden the truth from her, which was that a man she'd liked a great deal had not found her attractive, but had let her think so, simply so that he could look out of her window. "Oh God," she muttered, dropping a hand against the hood of the truck. "He told you this?"