by Paul Monette
Tony was merely offering them a terrific investment, after all. Sosa’s price was better than anything they could do. They put up all the front money, Tony put up none, and they split the coke in equal shares. Tony got about a fourth of it. Broken down into grams, it worked out to roughly 37,000 units a month. Much of this was job-lotted to smaller dealers, so Tony was taking in maybe sixty dollars a gram. Two-point-two million a month, and the whole structure was in place within four weeks, since Tony was able to take over the lion’s share of Frank’s client list. Some of the clients he parceled out to his partners in the consortium, just to keep everyone happy.
The work was staggering, of course. Tony was on the phone to Sosa in Bolivia twice a day, trading all the latest rumors as to busts and bribes and traffic foul-ups. He had a payroll of forty, from the bone-thin pharmacist who cut the coke to the Marielito punks who bagged the Quaaludes and ounced the marijuana, for Tony quickly saw that he had to diversify his product. A couple of times a month he would find himself on a jungle airstrip two hours’ flying time from Bogota, negotiating with wild men in ruined double-breasted European suits, while an ancient B-26 was being loaded in the background with bales of marijuana. He practically commuted to Panama City.
With the help of George Sheffield, Tony set up the Montana Realty Company in Little Havana for the laundering of funds. This was a storefront operation, and it offered wonderful bargains to the Cuban population. Blocks of bungalows were saved from the condo developers and made available to blue-collar workers who hadn’t had a proper home since they fled Cuba at the start of the revolution. Tony got an overnight reputation for generosity and civic duty. Within weeks the Chamber of Commerce was itching to give him a plaque.
Then they set up the Montana Diamond Trading Company, in a cubbyhole office above a drugstore on Calle Ocho. Here they could launder massive amounts, as they tapped into the international gem market and opened a phony office in The Netherlands, as well as several bank accounts in Basil. Things went like clockwork at the money end.
Still there were problems. Gaspar, one of the original gang, was ambushed one night and blown up in his car; and they never found out who did it. The little dealers were always shooting each other for petty cash, and in order to keep things quiet, Tony was caught in an enormous spiral of bribes among the cops and judges. The newspaper headlines grew more and more lurid: “Raid Nets 100 Million Dollar Cocaine Stash”; “135 Drug-Related Homicides So Far This Year.” There was a Time magazine coke cover. The Feds appointed commission after commission to make it all stop. They had no real effect, of course, but they made things very complicated.
Tony bought an old mansion in the most exclusive section of Coral Gables which had been Wasp since the days of Ponce de Leon. It had acres of lawns and a boat dock on a canal and beautiful stands of live oak hung with Spanish moss. Tony surrounded the whole property with a sophisticated electronic fence, and he sent in crew upon crew of workers to rejuvenate and swank up the old white-columned house. While the ringing of hammers went on inside, Tony erected a big neon sign on the front lawn. “THE WORLD IS YOURS,” it said.
During the months of reconstruction Tony and Elvira lived in a posh marina on Biscayne Bay, on a fifty-eight-foot boat that Tony picked up for a steal in Panama. That is, he literally stole it, as reprisal against a Panamanian official who screwed up a customs operation that left a dozen mules in jail. Neatly lettered along the hull was the boat’s new name: Elvira.
The lady herself had gone into a long funk following the death of Frank Lopez. For weeks she never left the yacht, but could be seen leaning over the rail for hours at a time, staring out at the waters of the bay as if she was on a cruise to nowhere. Tony was so busy getting his empire into place that he only saw her late at night, when she paced their gaudy silken cabin, all wired up from the day’s cocaine and rambling out the story of her past. She didn’t seem to mind Tony’s presence, though she hardly seemed to focus on him. She was even crazed to make love, and they did so every night, but especially then she was somewhere else, lost in a furious reverie that sometimes left her sobbing when she came.
Tony didn’t mind. Now that he possessed her he was full of an extraordinary patience. He could see what a wrenching, broken life she’d led—betrayed by her bankrupt parents, drifting from one bad man to another, stoned on her drug of choice since she was eighteen—and he knew it would take some time before she understood she was safe at last. What he really meant to do was restore her to her heritage. None of the mess and chaos of her life had destroyed the royal lineaments in her face. All she needed to rule was the kingdom of his heart, and together they would triumph. He could not be king without her. Power was not enough.
Meanwhile he filled the yacht with presents. During the week of her birthday she found a Cartier box on her breakfast tray every morning, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of her birthstone—diamonds, of course—before the week was out. She smiled in a dreamy, melancholy way as she opened each, and she always wore the day’s jewel to bed that night when they turned to make love. She seemed to understand that in some things Tony was determined to outdo Frank. When she wouldn’t leave the boat, streams of salesmen would arrive from various pricey stores, laden down with boxes. If she wouldn’t go shopping, the shopping would come to her. Her vials of cocaine were refilled every morning, no questions asked.
It was Tony’s idea that they get married. She had never been coy about it, maintaining staunchly since the day they met that marriage wasn’t for her. Tony had been in business about three months, they were due to move into the mansion in a couple of weeks, and he started to push the notion. She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no. Perhaps she was beginning to recover from the past. She was even willing to go out again, and they dropped by the Babylon several nights a week, where the rest of the cocaine royalty paid them court. They were beautiful to look at then, and they sometimes caught themselves looking at their reflection in the smoky mirrors that lined the walls. Then they would wink and smile through the mirror, as if they were invincible.
One day she opened one of the boxes from the stores, and in it was a bridal gown. She put it on and drifted about the boat for several hours, standing again at the rail and looking off to sea as if somebody had jilted her. When Tony came aboard late that night, she was lying in bed in the gown, propped against the pillows and reading Rolling Stone. A string of lines was tapped out on the coke mirror on the bedside table. Tony shot her a questioning look, and she shrugged her puff sleeves and said: “What the hell, let’s do it.”
He poured money into it. He had the garden of the mansion entirely relandscaped to accommodate two hundred guests, hauling in truckloads of white rose bushes and shrill albino peacocks. A caterer was brought from New York. An organ was installed among the live oaks. Limousines were sent for all the guests. To the neighbors it looked like a convergence of funerals backed up along the street, but then they were so upset about the neon sign, which showed no sign of being removed, they weren’t awfully rational when it came to the Montana place. The neighborhood had gone downhill with the force of a nuclear bomb.
The guests were in any case a motley assortment, emerging from the limousines looking like pimps and hookers, bodyguards at their sides, bulges in their pockets, rather as if they had come to attend a convention of Murder Incorporated, South Florida chapter. It was a brilliant thing Tony had done. There had not yet been a big family celebration to bring together the cocaine overlords. Echeverria came, and the Diaz Brothers with their chorus girl wives. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t open fire on one another before the week was out, but the event somehow defined them all as a social class of the highest blood. Tony’s wedding marked the occasion of his ascendancy among the kings, all in recognition of the dramatic boost he had given the local economy by dint of his deal with Sosa. The overlords let it happen because they needed a charismatic figure, and Tony was their JFK.
Fifty of the men sitting on pink satin folding chairs
on Tony’s lawn, then, were gangsters of one stripe or another. Gina, whom Tony had set up in a beauty salon of her own next door to Montana Realty, beat the bushes all over Dade County and came up with a list of relatives or pretty near, neighbors from the slum alleys of Havana, even the nun who’d taught Tony his catechism. Mama had finally agreed to come at the last minute. It was her stated intention never to set foot in Tony’s house, but after all the wedding was in the garden.
Elvira was represented, except for some few girlfriends (cokefriends, more accurately) and a couple of pansy dance partners, by a single Maryland aunt, Miss Theodora Evans. This estimable lady, who owned a tiny bookstore and art gallery in Annapolis, had been the black sheep of Elvira’s family when such things mattered, her reputation mostly founded on a two-weeks’ indiscretion with a flaming radical during the summer of her twentieth year. The flaming radical was from Harvard. Bohemian herself, Miss Theodora Evans had always supposed that her niece was living in Florida among artsy types, perhaps on a houseboat. She therefore dealt with the gangsters at the wedding as if they were violently avant-garde, painters maybe or composers.
The vows were exchanged in front of the very monsignor whose picture was on Frank Lopez’s wall at the bakery, shaking hands and wearing a baseball cap. The monsignor had made a couple of unctuous visits to Elvira on the yacht, treating her properly like a widow, which nobody else did. As soon as Tony wrote out a check for the bishop’s building fund, the monsignor finished his song of sorrows and began to treat Tony and Elvira as a marriage made in heaven. He would even gladly officiate, for a well-placed five thousand in cash.
Manolo was best man. Gina was maid of honor. While Tony and Elvira wore traditional black and white, Manolo sported a blue satin tux and Gina a dark blue ball gown, “Tara Blue” they called it. Of course all of Tony’s payroll was there, down to the ounce-men of Calle Ocho. Only the police sent no one. The Miami Chamber of Commerce dispatched a gelatinous man to give a toast at the wedding feast, but not the police. Even on such a triumphal day, when differences were buried, the police were required for the sake of discretion to maintain the position of silent partner.
Tony and Elvira looked as grave as children when they made their vows, as if they had stolen the lines from a much more formal culture, where men and women met in the old way and slowly grew to love one another, till at last they decided to risk their lives. Or was it perhaps that they didn’t quite believe the words, even as they said them? A certain glint of irony was in their eyes, of melancholy even, at so much talk of forever. Yet they looked astonishing that day, young and vital and yearning for each other, possessed of a secret place no one else could enter. It was as if they knew they might not have much time, and they mustn’t let today slip through their fingers. So they glowed like newlyweds all day long, like real ones.
There was supper under the trees by the quiet canal, mountains of shrimp and Dom Perignon, and an orchestra lush enough to have played Roseland. Tony led several groups to the tropical garden behind the house, where he showed off his wedding present to his bride. Huge wire cages had been set up among the trees, with a wilderness of monkeys in them, gibbons and tamarins and marmosets. Beyond was a lily-padded artificial pond, fifty feet long and kidney-shaped, with a small flock of flamingos promenading. Then there was a birdhouse full of twenty different kinds of parrots and macaws, jabbering as they flared their iridescent plumage.
“Here’s the king over here,” said Tony, guiding a party across a bright-red Japanese bridge to the orchid garden. They passed through a clump of tree ferns and came to the edge of a moat. Across the water, beneath a solitary banyan tree, stretched a nine-foot Bengal tiger. His stripes shivered as he paced his island. Mama and Aunt Theodora gasped in wonder.
“What is it?” whispered Mama.
“That’s the king, Mama,” said Tony, drawing Elvira into the circle of his arms. “He ain’t scared o’ nothin’.”
“What are you gonna do with him?” asked the old woman.
Tony laughed. “He’s gonna eat my enemies, Mama.”
He turned to Nick the Pig, who looked in his rented tux and ruffled shirt a bit like Charles Laughton. “Hey Nick, throw him his cake.”
Dutifully Nick unwrapped a paper napkin, revealing a sizable chunk of wedding cake. He tossed it across the moat, where it landed just in front of the pacing tiger. The beast gave it a cursory sniff, almost seemed to sneer, and resumed his pacing. “He ain’t hungry, boss,” Nick said.
“Maybe he ain’t ever been to a wedding,” said Tony.
Chi-Chi, who was escorting Aunt Theodora on his arm, piped up: “Hey Tony, let’s throw Nick in. He’ll like that better.”
Aunt Theodora clucked her tongue. “We better not, Chi-Chi,” she said. “Nick the Pig would eat the tiger.”
Everyone laughed. Just then they seemed extraordinarily like a family—all different shapes and sizes, brought together by a blessed event, wanting only the best for each other. In the end Mama was smitten by Elvira, whose laugh was brighter that day than even the coke could make it. She joked with Mama and Aunt Theodora, fresh as a schoolgirl, gay and irreverent. Nobody mentioned coke at all, and it crossed Tony’s mind that for once Elvira was clean. Perhaps it would become a habit. He was wrong, of course—there were dozens of tucks and folds in a bridal gown where a girl could hide her paraphernalia—but he couldn’t be blamed for wishing it so. It was the perfect day for pipe dreams.
They trailed back over the Japanese bridge, leaving the tiger to his deeper hunger. Chi-Chi and Nick the Pig bore the old women away to the dance floor. Tony pulled Elvira off the path and ducked among the banana palms. As he gathered her into his arms, the gown whispering about her, he caught a glint of blue out of the corner of one eye. He turned his head and thought he saw Manolo and Gina disappearing among the trees. But then Elvira drew him back to her, nibbling at his lips, breathing into his mouth.
“Is this the happy ending?” she whispered between kisses.
“No,” said Tony tenderly, “this is just the beginning.”
And they embraced again in the glut of tropical green, the orchids thick around them, the parrots shrieking. It was all a mirage, this paradisal island; but for now, this afternoon, it was lush as the Garden of Eden. They kissed and laughed and kissed again, and they looked in their formal clothes as if they’d escaped from a wedding cake to a place of constant summer. Nothing hunted them. Nothing threatened. Just for a moment they seemed to live in a wilderness all their own.
The Banco Sud di Miami had a beautiful green marble facade that fronted Brickell Avenue. It faced a Barclay’s Bank across the street and fitted securely between Payne Webber on one side and Dreyfuss on the other. The Banco Sud di Miami had only been chartered a year ago, but it was no slouch in the money department, able to hold its own quite well among its tonier neighbors. Even the fireplug on the curb out front was brass.
In the parking lot in back, Tony and Manolo supervised as Chi-Chi and Martin unloaded several duffel bags from a Volkswagen van. A bank guard appeared from the rear of the building, pushing a kind of trolley. The Banco Sud di Miami had had to order these trolleys special. No other bank had ever needed one, not in Miami anyway. Maybe in Vegas, maybe in Jersey they used such things. The duffel bags were piled one by one on the trolley, and Manolo went along as the guard wheeled it back to the counting room. Manolo would have to supervise the counting; it would take hours.
Tony headed into the bank proper and was escorted upstairs to the president’s office. He didn’t have to wait ten seconds before the ebullient man himself appeared to pump his hand. Samuel Taft Eliot Stearns couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. With his razored hair and his SCUBA tan and the snug fit of his Lanvin suit he could have been a movie star; he would have been the first to acknowledge that. He was a man who never stopped thinking money. On weekends he followed the Hong Kong money markets on a terminal in his house, so he would always have a jump on Monday.
He ordered beers for
him and Tony. He told a stupid joke. He thought it was he who had called this meeting, that what they were getting around to was what Stearns himself had to say. Perhaps this was why he was so full of upper-class airs this morning. He fiddled with a pipe. He kept stretching one arm and kneading the elbow, unconsciously it seemed, but he acted as if he’d played two hours of tennis before coming in. His bow tie was tight as a drum and wobbled when he swallowed. He was cleaning his glasses, talking about his weekend sail, about to speak man-to-man, when Tony interrupted.
“Sam, I can’t pay this percentage no more. I’m gonna be bringin’ in more than I ever brung in before. I’m talking maybe ten mill a month. Ten percent off the top o’ that’s way outa line. You gotta come down, it’s as simple as that.”
“Can’t do, Tony,” said Stearns, with an irritable shake of his head. He was annoyed at having his thunder stolen. His pipe went out.
“That’s too bad, Sam, ’cause I’ll tell you somethin’. There’s other banks.”
“Hey, Tony, this is not a wholesale store, sellin’ stereos to niggers. The more you bring in, the harder it is to wash. I’m sorry to tell you, but we’ve got to raise our rates.”
Tony stood up and turned to go. It wasn’t that he had so many banks to choose from. Banks were the hard part; Sheffield had made that clear from the first. But right now he figured he’d be better off stashing the whole load in a coffee can under the porch. He was that mad.