The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

  Leonard Danzig did not stand trial but was instead committed for the remainder of his natural life to the Hermione Curzon Institution for the Hopelessly Irreparable in Moab, Illinois.

  “Jimmy Boyle’s father says Danzig should have gotten the electric chair,” Roy told his mother. “What do you think?”

  “You can’t execute all of the sick people in the world, Roy. There are too many. Once you start doing that it would never stop.”

  “Don’t you think the world would be better off if Leonard Danzig wasn’t in it?”

  Roy’s mother, who had already been divorced twice and had a third marriage annulled, said, “Him and a few other men I can name.”

  THE SHARKS

  Roy was eight years old when he flew with his mother and her boyfriend Johnny Salvavidas from Miami to the Bahamas for a long weekend. There was a casino in the hotel on the island where they stayed and Johnny liked to gamble. During the day, Roy and his mother went to the beach or hung out at the hotel swimming pool while he played blackjack. At night, after dinner, Roy watched TV in their room and Johnny played roulette while Roy’s mother watched him lose.

  “The wheel is best challenged in the night time,” he told Roy. “It’s a game that requires witnesses.”

  “Why?” Roy asked.

  “To play boldly, with daring, a man must be brave, and bravery demands an audience. Alone every man is a coward. The ability to conquer one’s fears is enhanced by the arousal of blood in others.”

  “It takes skill, too,” said Roy. “My Uncle Buck says to win consistently you have to do the math, that you can’t succeed unless you know the odds. He says at roulette the odds are always against you, especially when the wheel has a double zero.”

  “Johnny knows what he’s doing, Roy,” said his mother.

  The third day they were there the three of them had lunch together on a terrace of the hotel. Both Roy’s mother and Johnny Salvavidas were sipping from big glasses with tropical fruits impaled on the rims. Roy was nibbling giant prawns that he dipped into a spicy red sauce. The pieces of chipped ice in the bowl under the prawns melted faster than he could eat them.

  “Bob Donovan invited us to go with him and some other guests this afternoon to a beach on the other side of the island,” Roy’s mother said. “It’s supposed to be very beautiful and uncrowded.”

  “I’m sure it will be,” said Johnny.

  Johnny Salvavidas was from the Dominican Republic, which was on an island Roy had never been to. His mother had been there once with Johnny. When she came back from that trip to get Roy, whom she had left with his grandmother Rose in Chicago, he overheard his mother telling Rose that in the capital city of Santo Domingo everyone is a thief.

  “Johnny told me to never carry any money except for a few coins and not to wear my rings if I went out by myself. He always carried a pistol while we were there.”

  “Surely not everyone in Santo Domingo is a thief,” Rose said. “People work in the sugar mills and the cane fields. Besides, Johnny carries a gun when he’s in Chicago, too.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. He probably thinks everyone in Chicago is a thief.”

  Roy and his mother accompanied Bob Donovan, who was from Cleveland but had been living in the Bahamas for a few years, and six other hotel guests to Emerald Beach. Bob Donovan drove them in a rusty, blue Chevy van and told them on the way that there was a good restaurant at the beach with a bar in case anyone got hungry or thirsty. The trip took forty minutes over a rough road. Roy’s mother asked Bob Donovan what business he’d been in in Cleveland and he said, “Cement. You can’t go wrong in cement.”

  Emerald Beach looked like both of the other beaches Roy and his mother had already been to but it was uncrowded. In fact, no other swimmers or even sun bathers were there. Roy and his mother went into the water right away. It was crystal clear, like all of the water around the island, and shallow for a long way out. A couple of other people went swimming, too; the rest of the group went to the bar with Bob Donovan and did not go into the water at all during the two or three hours they were there.

  When they got back to the hotel, Roy and his mother took showers and then lay down on their beds. Roy fell asleep but woke up when he heard Johnny and his mother talking in loud voices.

  “How was I supposed to know it was dangerous?” she said. “You could have warned me.”

  “Donovan takes tourists there because he gets a kickback from the bar. Nick Turco told me Emerald Beach is shark-infested. That’s why no locals go there.”

  “Who’s Nick Turco?”

  “A guy I know from Fort Lauderdale. I ran into him in the casino. He’s in the construction business. He’s down here on a gambling junket.”

  “You’re supposed to take care of us, Johnny. You could have come and taken us back.”

  She sat down on Roy’s bed and held him close to her. Her skin was soft and hot. She was slim with large breasts, long legs and flaming chestnut-colored hair. Roy was beginning to understand why men were attracted to her.

  Johnny Salvavidas stood and patted his thick, black mustache with the fingers of his right hand as if it were the top of a dog’s head, then he left the room. He said something in Spanish when he was outside in the hallway.

  “We’re lucky no sharks were at Emerald Beach today, aren’t we, Roy?”

  “I read in a book about sea creatures that a moray eel has an even stronger bite than a shark’s,” Roy said. “After it’s sunk its teeth in, a moray never lets go. To kill it you have to cut off the head with a machete.”

  The early evening sun was streaming into the room. Roy’s mother got up and drew the curtains.

  “Johnny shouldn’t be upset,” said Roy. “He wasn’t the one who could have been bitten by sharks.”

  SMART GUYS

  “The girl used to dance at La Paloma. Jasmine Ford. I don’t know if that was her real name.”

  “It wasn’t. Not her first name, anyway. Marlene, Marla, something like that. You thinkin’ what?”

  “Where’s she’s got to, that’s all.”

  “You ready to do something dumb again, huh?”

  “I’m not a smart guy like you, Freddie.”

  Harry Castor walked toward LaSalle. He had a room there, a basement. A real comedown, he thought, every time he woke up there or came back to it. No place to bring Jasmine Ford. Castor came from Kansas City, Kansas. He was a musician, a drummer. In Chicago he jammed with guys he met hanging around the clubs, sat in here and there when the opportunity arose. Harry was getting in until he got shot one night in a currency exchange where he’d gone to cash a check from one of his rare gigs. A teenager was killed trading gunfire with a security guard and Castor got caught in the crossfire, taking a slug from the punk in his left hand. The bullet passed through the palm and put a permanent crimp in his career as a percussionist.

  After he recovered from the gunshot wound, Harry partnered with Freddie DiMartini selling phony home burglary insurance policies. Roy’s friend Jimmy Boyle’s uncle, Donal Liffey, had done time at Joliet with DiMartini; according to Jimmy, Liffey was the mastermind behind the insurance scam.

  “Uncle Donal says this hustle is foolproof,” Jimmy told Roy. “He has his own guys rob an insured house once in a while and he pays off. Those homeowners tell their friends about the Midnight Insurance Company and they sign up, too. It’s just him and DiMartini and a new guy, Harry Castor, used to be a jazz drummer. I like Harry. He has a hole in the palm of his left hand he keeps a hundred dollar bill in.”

  Roy and Jimmy were in the same fifth grade class. They were walking to school together when Jimmy told Roy about his uncle’s operation.

  “What do you mean he keeps a C-note in a hole in his hand? How’d he get the hole there?”

  “Some yom was tryna stick up a currency exchange and Harry walked in on it. The guard draws on the yom, they go high noon, and Harry takes one in the hand.”

  “Who shot him, the st
ick-up man or the security guard?”

  “I don’t know, and neither does Harry. I asked him and he said the slug went out the other side. Could’ve been from either gun.”

  A couple of months after Jimmy Boyle told Roy about the scam, the two boys were sitting in the kitchen in Jimmy’s house after school eating liver sausage sandwiches when his Uncle Donal came in with Freddie DiMartini and Harry Castor. Donal Liffey, Jimmy’s mother’s brother, lived with them. He had supported his sister and her son since Jimmy’s father was run down and killed walking home at one A.M. from Milt’s Tap Room on Elston Avenue two years before. The driver kept going and there were no eyewitnesses. Donal, a bachelor, moved in a few days later and had become the most significant male figure in his nephew’s life. Jimmy thought his Uncle Donal was the smartest man in Chicago.

  “Hey there, me bucko,” Donal said to Jimmy. “Who’s your pal?”

  Donal was a small but well-built man with thick black hair and squinty blue eyes. He’d been a pretty good amateur lightweight in his youth, and at forty-two he maintained his fighting weight. Donal idolized James Cagney, the way he’d been in City for Conquest, where he played a boxer who gets blinded by an opponent’s unscrupulous corner men. “All the pros thought Cagney had been a boxer,” Donal liked to tell people, “but he hadn’t. He was a good dancer and knew how to move, he had the footwork. He spoke Irish and Yiddish, too. Did you know that?”

  Freddie DiMartini was only slightly bigger than Donal but he leaned to his right both when he walked or stood still. He said it was because when he was a kid a horse pulling an ice wagon had kicked him in his back, but Donal knew Freddie had taken a beating in reform school that partially crippled him. A guy who’d been in reform school with Freddie told Donal that DiMartini had been stealing the other boys’ comic books and they had ganged up on him.

  Harry Castor was a large man with big shoulders and big hands, one of which had a hole in it.

  “Harry,” said Jimmy, “Roy wants to see the Benjamin.”

  “Harry walked over to where Roy was sitting and held out his left hand, palm open. There was a corner of a bill that had been folded over a few times with the number 100 showing.

  “Your dad owns Lake Shore Liquors, doesn’t he?” Donal asked Roy.

  “Yes,” Roy said.

  “He’s a stand up guy. His name’s Rudy, right?”

  Roy nodded.

  “He did me a good turn once. You got good taste in friends, Jimmy.”

  Donal shook Roy’s hand and then the three men went into a back room and closed the door.

  “Does your mom work?” Roy asked Jimmy.

  “At Woolworth’s on Minnetonka. She’s the head of the sewing counter. Uncle Donal tells her she should quit but she likes doin’ it. She has friends there she says she’d miss if she didn’t see ’em every day. Uncle Donal pays the bills but my mother says what if somethin’ happens to him like happened to my father?”

  Six weeks later something did happen to Jimmy’s Uncle Donal and to Freddie DiMartini, too. They were shotgunned by a man whose house they were breaking into at three o’clock in the morning. Donal was killed and DiMartini was blinded.

  “What about Harry?” Roy asked Jimmy Boyle.

  “He split,” Jimmy said. “He was probably there, maybe drivin’ the car, but nobody saw him. My mother got a letter yesterday and the only thing in the envelope was a folded-up hundred dollar bill.”

  APACHERIA

  Roy and his friend Jimmy Boyle were walking to school on a rainy morning when a car passed them going too fast and went out of control, skidding on its two right side wheels before crashing into a telephone pole. The woman who had been driving was thrown from the car and was lying in the street. Roy and Jimmy ran over to see if she was all right. She was on her back with her eyes closed and her mouth open but she was not bleeding. The driver was young, in her late teens or early twenties, and her dress was up around her waist exposing her bare legs and underwear. A few cars passed by without stopping.

  “We should call an ambulance,” said Jimmy.

  A man wearing denim overalls came out of an apartment building and looked at the girl.

  “I heard noise,” he said. “I’m janitor here.”

  “Call an ambulance,” said Roy.

  “I call cops, too.”

  The man went back into the building. The girl was not moving. She had fluffy, medium-length brown hair, high cheekbones, a short, straight nose and full red lips.

  “She’s really pretty,” Roy said.

  “You think we should pull down her dress?” asked Jimmy. “Cover her up?”

  “Probably better not to touch her before the ambulance comes.”

  “Think she’s dead?”

  “She’s breathing. See? Her chest is going up and down.”

  Rain was still falling lightly when two police cars arrived, followed a few seconds later by an ambulance. By this time a few passersby and residents of nearby houses were gathered on the sidewalk.

  “Anybody see how this happened?” asked one of the cops.

  “We did,” said Jimmy Boyle. “Roy and I were walkin’ to school and we seen the car skid and smash into the pole. It’s a ’56 Chevy.”

  “Were there other cars on the road? Maybe coming toward her?”

  “No,” said Roy, “just this one.”

  He and Jimmy watched as the ambulance attendants tucked a blanket around the unconscious girl from the neck down and lifted her onto a gurney then loaded it into the wagon.

  “She have any passengers?” the cop asked. “Anybody walk away from the vehicle after the collision?”

  Both Roy and Jimmy shook their heads.

  The janitor, who had come back out and was standing next to the boys, said, “I call ambulance. Nobody run.”

  A tow truck arrived and one of the cops told the spectators to move away from the wrecked car. The ambulance drove off, its siren blaring.

  “Okay, boys,” said the cop who’d been asking questions, “you’d better go on to school.”

  Another cop came over and said, “Let’s go, Lou. Eisenhower’ll be at the Palmer House quarter to ten.”

  “We’re late,” Jimmy said to the first cop. “Can you give us a note?”

  He removed from one of his pockets a pad of traffic tickets, scribbled on it, ripped out the page and handed it to Jimmy.

  “When you boys are old enough to drive remember not to speed on a wet street.”

  Roy and Jimmy watched the tow truck guys attach cables to the car and signal to the winch operator to pull the car right side up. After that was done they hooked up the front bumper and hauled it away. The cops got back into their cars and headed for The Loop.

  “I didn’t know the president was comin’ to Chicago today,” said Jimmy.

  “What did the cop write?” Roy asked him.

  Jimmy showed the yellow ticket page to Roy, who read it out loud.

  “These two boys witnessed a traffic accident this A.M. Car hit pole corner Granville and Washtenaw approx. 8:45. Please excuse them being late. Ofc. P. Madigan, Badge 882.”

  “Look at this,” said Jimmy.

  Lying next to the curb where the car had been on its side was a pink make-up compact with a cracked cover. Jimmy picked it up.

  “Maybe she was puttin’ on make-up while she drove,” he said, and put the compact into his right jacket pocket.

  “You gonna keep it?”

  “Yeah. If the cops come back to inspect the scene I don’t want her to get in trouble.”

  The janitor and the other observers had all gone back into their houses and the boys began walking toward the school.

  “You’re right,” Jimmy said.

  “About what?”

  “She was pretty. Her legs and everything.”

  “I felt bad,” said Roy, “lookin’ at her that way. Part naked, I mean. I hope her neck’s not broken.”

  “Me, too. I couldn’t stop lookin’ either.”

  T
hat afternoon in American History Roy was reading about the war with the Apache Indians on the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1870s when he thought about the girl. He wondered if Apaches came across a white woman lying alone and unconscious on a desert trail, maybe thrown from a horse, would they have stopped to help her or leave her to burn in the sun and be nibbled by insects and torn apart by coyotes. He knew that the Apaches did not take scalps but they did bury living enemies up to their necks in the ground and lather their faces with tiswin—corn liquor—in order to attract killer ants that ate out their eyeballs and invaded their noses and ears.

  After school Roy asked Jimmy Boyle what he thought the Apaches would have done and Jimmy said, “Are you kiddin’? Those young bucks wouldn’t leave a pretty girl to rot. Not once they seen her legs.”

  DARK AND BLACK AND STRANGE

  As a boy, Roy often stayed up much of the night watching movies on TV. Most of them were old, black and white films from the 1930s and ’40s. When he and his mother were living in hotels in Miami, Havana or New Orleans, she was usually out during the late night and early morning hours, leaving Roy by himself, which he did not mind; when they were in Chicago, staying at his grandmother’s house, he had a little television in his room to watch the all-night movies on channel nine, a local station that owned an extensive archive of classic as well as obscure films.

  The movies Roy preferred were mystery, crime and horror pictures such as The End of Everything, Stairway to Doom, Three-and-a-Half Jealous Husbands, Fanged Sphinx of Fez, and Demented Darlings. By far his favorite was Snake Girl, starring Arleena Mink, a purportedly Eurasian actress of uncertain provenance, who never made another movie. Unlike Cult of the Cobra, also one of Roy’s favorites, which featured a woman who turned into a viper in order to commit murders, Snake Girl was about a child abandoned, supposedly by her parents, in a swamp for unexplained reasons.