King Bongo

by Thomas Sanchez

  Zapata quickly checked himself, brought himself back to the present. Enough of reverie. He whispered to Bongo seated next to him.

  “The President isn’t safe.”

  “Hell,” Bongo answered, “nobody is safe from the President.”

  “You should be careful. That kind of talk can get you into trouble.”

  “I’ve already got trouble. Why am I on this little joyride?”

  “Police business.”

  “How do I know we’re going to the morgue? You could be taking me to the Blue Mansion.”

  A rumba rhythm jumped from the radio and filled the car. Pedro and Paulo slapped out the beat with their hands on the metal dashboard. They were happy now. Pedro floored the gas pedal and the Plymouth shot deeper into the outskirts of Havana.

  Bongo looked out the window. They were passing through the slums.

  “Castro,” Zapata whispered, “an old fox in a young fox’s body.”

  “I heard he wasn’t killed in the invasion. That he’s shacked up with a hooker in Acapulco.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Or read in the papers?”

  “Both.”

  “Why are you telling me this? It’s none of my business. It’s not my fight.”

  “It’s going to be. It’s going to be everyone’s fight. Sooner or later you’ll have to choose.”

  “Cubans have been doing that since the turn of the century. It doesn’t make any difference what they choose because they always end up getting something they didn’t ask for.”

  “This time is different.”

  Outside, Bongo saw a small boy standing in the dust as the car passed. The boy wore no pants, just a tattered T-shirt. His belly was bloated—ironically, from eating almost nothing. He turned back to the doorway of a shack with a roof of dried palm fronds. Something dangled from the crack of the boy’s buttocks, a flashing silver thread. Bongo knew what it was.

  Bongo turned back to Zapata. “I don’t know why you think this time is different. Everything is the same as before.”

  “That’s just the point,” Zapata agreed. He too had seen the tapeworm that had grown so big in the boy’s gut that it dangled out of his butt. “Maybe this time these people will listen. If they do, God pity you, God pity me.”

  “I have nothing to fear. I’m not political, you know that.”

  “There isn’t any such thing as being non-political. You’re a man, you’ve got a penis. You can make love with it or you can piss with it. It’s your choice.”

  “I’m not pissing my life away.”

  “No. If anything you’re fucking it away.”

  “Man’s fate. You should know about that.”

  Zapata didn’t say another word the rest of the way back into Havana.

  Bongo was thankful for the silence. Of all the people in the world not to be talking to him about a wasted life it was Zapata. Zapata didn’t have a life, he had a trap, a trap of his own making.

  The tires of the Plymouth slapped pavement. They were no longer on a dirt road but on the highway heading into downtown Havana. The traffic thickened, people were crowded onto the sidewalks, the buildings became larger. The great dome of the Capitolio hovered above the skyline.

  The Plymouth pulled up in front of the morgue. The morgue was like many buildings in Old Havana, Spanish Colonial, hundreds of years old, built in a grandiose manner and rising four stories above the street. In former times it had been a nobleman’s mansion, a bank, a prison, a hospital. Now the high-arched windows were bricked in.

  Bongo hated the morgue, its subterranean stone vaulted rooms parading off into dark recesses where cadavers were stacked up in cubicles. He hated the smell as he walked with Zapata down a long corridor. The air was clammy, not humid like outside but dank, like the devil’s private wine cellar.

  From the opposite end of the corridor, a man scuttled toward them. He wore a blood-spattered smock over his clothes, and his shoes were covered with chalky dust. He seemed to be some kind of netherworld crab. The Crab’s laughter sprang from an oversized clown-red tongue, echoing against the stone walls. “Hah-hah-hah!”

  The Crab stopped. “What can I do for you? Bake a cake? Break an egg? Hah-hah-hah!” He circled around Bongo and Zapata as if sizing them up for a casket. “Are you here for yourselves, or for a relative?”

  Zapata showed his police badge.

  The circling Crab raised his eyebrows. “Do you have an appointment? Hah-hah-hah!”

  “I’m Humberto Zapata. You knew I was coming.”

  “Oh, so you are Captain Secret. Tell me, if your kind are so secret, why do you drive around in cars marked ‘Secret Intelligence’? What’s the sense in that? Hah-hah-hah!”

  “I’ve got a corpse for you. Fished out of the ocean off of Playas del Este. I want a full autopsy.”

  “Oh, goody, I hope it’s a big fish. Hah-hah-hah!”

  “Outside in my car, in the trunk.”

  “A most welcome guest here. Plenty of room at the inn. Hah-hah-hah!”

  “How long will it take?”

  “This is our busy season, Christmas–New Year’s holidays, lots of gruesome suicides and juicy car wrecks. But since you have an appointment, I can work all night and have the happy results for you by morning.”

  “Thanks for fitting it into your busy schedule.”

  “It’s like President Batista’s palace around here, everybody dropping in asking for favors. I do my job, I don’t play favorites. Roll ’em in, check ’em out, stack ’em up, they’re all equal to me. Hah-hah-hah!”

  “You’ve got a customer in here that I called about earlier.”

  “I get so many calls. Impossible to keep track.”

  “The one with no ID. You had some people in who might have been the parents, but they couldn’t make a positive identification.”

  “Oh, I remember. Say, that woman was good-looking, but did she puke when she saw the customer. Just puked and puked, rice and beans all over the floor. And the hubby was no help, bawling like a baby. A man shouldn’t be emotional.”

  “I brought someone who might make the ID.”

  The Crab peered at Bongo. “You’re not a sissy, are you? You’re not a puker? If you are I’m going to give you a bucket to heave up in. Hah-hah-hah!”

  Bongo assured the Crab, “I don’t need a bucket.” Then he looked at Zapata. What was he up to? A terrible thought came over Bongo, a wave of nausea. What if Zapata’s demented game was that he brought him here to ID his own sister?

  “If you’ve seen stiffs before”—the Crab winked at Bongo—“then let’s be on our merry way.”

  The Crab led them through a maze of corridors into a bone-chilling room. He read the numbers stenciled on the doors of cadaver lockers until he came to the right one. He pulled the door open and tugged on a steel pulley. Out rolled a body covered by a rubber sheet.

  “Here you are,” the Crab announced. “Fresh from the oven!”

  “Let’s have a look,” Zapata urged.

  The Crab grinned at Bongo. “Don’t get queasy.” He grabbed the corner of the sheet and ripped it off like a magician displaying a marvelous trick.

  Bongo stared in horror.

  Zapata coaxed Bongo to speak. “Can you make the ID?”

  Bongo heard words, but they weren’t Zapata’s. He heard the words spoken the night before by Mr. Wu, while sitting in the back of the Packard Victoria: “Let’s say you just got married, you had your honeymoon night, it was bliss, and the next day your wife disappeared…. You searched and searched but couldn’t find her…. Finally the police called and said they had someone who might be your wife at the morgue and they wanted you to come and identify her.”

  “Do you know who she is?” Zapata whispered.

  “So you go there. It is a depressing place. You go into a cold room.”

  Zapata whispered louder, “Who is it?”

  Wu’s words rang in Bongo’s ears: “The police roll out a cart with a body on i
t. You close your eyes, because you don’t want to see her once smiling eyes. They ask, ‘Is this your wife?’ ”

  “Tell me!” Zapata demanded.

  “You just stand there, you don’t want to know. She’s not breathing; she’s dead. You are afraid to inhale her scent, afraid to breathe. But you must know the truth. What do you smell?”

  Zapata nodded to the Crab. “He can’t come up with anything. Roll this abomination away.”

  “What do you smell?”

  “Cinnamon!” Bongo shouted. “Cinnamon and jasmine!”

  “What?” Zapata was confused.

  Bongo felt the tears that would sting his eyes if he cried, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t. The mangled flesh before him was blackened and burned. He was afraid to inhale the scent. But he knew what it had once smelled like.

  “Who is she?” Zapata prodded.

  “Mercedes!” The name exploded from Bongo’s chest. “I can tell from the bits of satin dress…. It’s what she was wearing last night.”

  Zapata gripped Bongo’s arm. “Are you going to throw up?”

  “No!”

  “If you hadn’t gone outside to get that orchid from Wu, you would have been at Mercedes’ side when the bomb went off.”

  “So what?”

  “Who would want to kill you?”

  BOOK TWO

  tropical alibis

  1.

  No Virgins

  Sweet Maria’s night job was at the Three Virgins Bar. It was a tough joint where every creep could crawl, every crippled thought could talk, and every fly on the wall could hear it all. Guys spilled the guts of their lies as beer foamed, whiskey flowed, rum drummed. If a man came in hard through the door everyone would mark him and take him down with a shouted challenge. Or they would offer to buy him a bottle of booze, drink it with him, then club him over the head with the empty bottle. If a tough man survived being marked in the Three Virgins, then walked out into the night watching his own staggering shadow, he’d never see the knife that twisted into him sideways with a shout in his ear, “You’re not so tough!”

  Don’t act tough in a place where the sun has melted every promise, where every man’s grandfather worked a lifetime of fourteen-hour days with a machete, clearing jungle and hacking cane for the reward of two fistfuls of rice and beans a day. At the same time his wife’s or sister’s skinny ass was being whipped in a breeding shed by an overseer who made sure that no slave wasted a second, that no wench went more than a month after grunting out a baby before being knocked up again so she could grow another cocoa colored kid.

  Don’t act tough in the Three Virgins, act sorry. Sorry as hell, crazy as hell, mad as hell, full of jism and half-baked reason. Never act like you have anything to teach another man, or anything to put over on him. Never act like the master. No way. That’s a disaster. Better to scratch your balls through your pants and move on with your bad self. Move on with a grin and don’t order a gin but a sugarcane aguardiente, then laugh and say that gin is shit for the white suckers, or their boot-licking golf caddies, pool cleaners, lawn cutters, car washers, all of them trying to act like overseers. Be a man whose arm still twitches from swinging a machete every day like his daddy and granddaddy before him. If someone else is buying, then it’s okay to have a rum, the darker the better, black if they’ve got it, damn near the consistency of tar if you can get it, then slug it down, shrug the world off. Don’t shrug the world off because it gets up on top and beats you down. Shrug it off because life’s not worth a shit. And don’t act tough. Take another swig of rum or aguardiente, give a laugh. Don’t worry who’s looking over your shoulder, whether it be an angel or a devil.

  Bongo watched Maria serving drinks behind the bar counter. He was just about to order another rum when he heard whistling catcalls. He spun around on his stool. Through the swinging doors came Guy Armstrong, dressed in white pants and shirt, his blond American features gleaming, a white tennis sweater looped casually over his shoulders, white plastic sunglasses set squarely on his nose.

  The American moved through the room, parting the crowd of men as if they were mere waves making way for his grand cruise ship, sailing high, white and mighty right up to the bar, where his butt docked on a barstool, still stinging from all the slaps it had taken as it moved through the waves to its momentary safe harbor. Armstrong pulled out a wad of dollars and slapped them on the bar. “Maria,” he called, “aguardientes for all of my amigos.” And amigos he did have. They surrounded him like the gulls that follow a fishing boat to port hoping to feast on the knifed-out guts being thrown overboard or on the swill of the bilge floating to the water’s boiling surface. It made no difference to these scavengers. Food was food, dollars were dollars, drinks were drinks, and they were being offered by a man who wasn’t bothered by the surrounding rough hands that came pawing out of the air, trying to touch his green money, his white skin, to cop a feel between his legs or filch the fat wallet from his pocket.

  Maria poured out shots of thick, sweet aguardiente to the sea of insistent hands around Armstrong. Her long black hair swished around her as she swiveled on high-heeled shoes. The shoes were red and glittering, like the sparkling red eyes of a snake writhing on the floor, or Dorothy’s runaway shoes from the movieland of Oz, inexplicably here, in a waterfront dive on the edge of Havana Bay.

  The surrounding frenzy grew more insistent. It wasn’t Bongo’s beat, these queer and not so queer fellows who would steer in any direction the money was blowing them. The aguardiente was having its effect. The floor swelled up and heaved. From the jukebox blasted an American voice. “They’ll be love letters in the sand.”

  Guy Armstrong raised his aguardiente glass to the gang of admirers surrounding him in tight tank-top T-shirts that exposed their muscled arms glistening with sweat. Armstrong opened his mouth and lip-synched to the American voice pulsing from the jukebox, “They’ll be loooove leettteers in the saaaand.” Most of the men didn’t understand the English words. They couldn’t even write their own names in Spanish, since they’d been thrown into the bottomless pit of the labor pool before they were old enough to go to school. But they lip-synched along because the words were empty of meaning and easy to mimic, and because the alcoholic sugar of the cane fields was coursing in the blood history of their veins. As the night outside turned bluer-black, and the waves of the ocean pounded in furious spray along the stone-walled Malecón in the distance, it seemed certain that tonight at the Three Virgins some lucky soul’s ship was going to come in, and maybe it would even come in twice.

  Bongo glimpsed the edge of a two-dollar bill tucked into the top of Sweet Maria’s bra, exposed above the skimpy ruffle of her low-cut blouse. Maria was covering all her bets. She crooned right along with the others as she worked her way down the bar, pouring out more shots from a fresh bottle of aguardiente. She stopped in front of Bongo, the bottle poised over his glass. Her low voice was flirtatious as she flicked her long black eyelashes. “How come you aren’t singing, white boy?”

  “It’s not my beat.”

  “And what is your beat?”

  Bongo’s hands came up. He held them open-palmed over the glossy wood of the counter. His fingers came down in a flurry, beating out a fierce, complicated rhythm.

  “I like you.” Maria’s sultry voice deepened as her eyelashes seemed to lengthen. She refilled Bongo’s glass. “I’ve seen you before.”

  “We’ve never met.”

  “You can’t fool Sweet Maria. You’re the quiet type. I like quiet.”

  “I’ve never been in here. Must have me confused with someone else.”

  “No, we don’t get many white ones. When we do, I remember. You’ve been coming here a lot lately.”

  “All of us white boys look alike.”

  Maria laughed. “That’s right, when you’re naked on a bedsheet you’re all white as ghosts. You ever made love to a ghost?”

  “I guess we’ve all made that mistake once or twice.” Bongo finished off his drink. The sugar hit
raced through his blood. Maria did look familiar, and not just from when he had been in the bar. Where had he seen her?

  “Can you do that again?”

  “Make love to a ghost?”

  “No. What you just did with your hands.”

  “It was just noise.”

  “I know that beat, it’s African. Where would a white boy learn how to do that?”

  “I guess he would start by spending a long time in the dark.”

  Maria shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the sound you just made doesn’t come from the night. It comes from the day. It comes from the African sun, from the yuka drum.”

  Bongo slipped his hands into his pockets. “Maybe you didn’t hear what you thought you did.”

  “Oh, I heard it all right. Just what kind of a girl do you think I am, not to hear a sacred drumbeat?”

  “I’m sure you’re a good girl.”

  “That’s right. And it’s Queen Erzulie that makes me do bad things that are good for her.” Maria crossed herself and touched the two-dollar bill sticking out of her bra.

  Bongo winked. “Erzulie’s going to make you do something bad right now?”

  “She might.” Maria leaned forward. She shook her long hair, it smelled like burning hemp. “Queen Erzulie makes me smoke cigars and drink rum. She makes me chase men.”

  Bongo looked over his shoulder. Armstrong was leading his fans in a new song from the jukebox.

  “Is that what you’re interested in?” Maria nodded to Armstrong.

  “What?” Bongo feigned ignorance.

  “The rich American? I’m surprised. You don’t look the type.”

  “What the hell would make you think I am?”

  “The way you look at him.”

  “Just curious.”

  “About what? What’s he have that I don’t?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Okay, he’s got white skin and money. It ain’t only money, honey.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bongo saw Armstrong moving.

  “I’ve got to go.”