“Oh, shit, it’s you!”
“Yeah, the husband.”
“I didn’t touch a hair on her head. Take the wallet, there’s some dough in it, and the watch is solid gold.”
“You movie pricks think you can buy the world. I’m not here to take anything. I’m here to give you something.”
“What?”
“This.” PayDay put the tip of his gun barrel to the Actor’s lips. “Why don’t you suck on this. That’s why you actors are so well paid, isn’t it?”
“That, and we eat a lot of concrete pussy too.”
The Teenager screamed, “Daddy, don’t talk to him like that! Can’t you see he’s going to blow your brains out!”
The Actor’s eyes widened in surprise at PayDay. “Would you really dare to kill a movie hero?”
“In my movie”—PayDay clicked off the gun’s safety—“you’re the bad guy who dies in the end.”
The Actor slid under the water, as if he could hide there. He saw the gun aimed down at him. His cheeks puffed up, bubbles escaping from his mouth as he tried to hold his breath.
“Don’t let him drown!” the Teenager pleaded.
PayDay reached into the water, grabbed the Actor by the ears and yanked his head up. He could see behind the Actor’s ears a white crisscrossing of scars where the skin had been slit and pulled up by face-lifts. From beneath the Actor’s hairnet, black hair dye trickled down.
Tears came into the Actor’s eyes. “Dear boy! Don’t let me die like this! What will my fans think?”
PayDay shoved the gun barrel deep into the Actor’s mouth.
The Actor pissed with fear, a yellow cloud escaping from his limp pecker into the bathwater. The cloud grew larger, creeping above the Actor’s waist to the water’s surface.
The scent of piss pierced PayDay’s nostrils. It wasn’t like his wife’s sweet pee, when she sat enthroned on the toilet while he brushed her hair. No, this had the stink of a rancid fart from a dragon’s asshole.
PayDay pulled the gun out of the Actor’s mouth.
The Actor moaned, “I didn’t fuck your wife.”
“I know that.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me you didn’t.”
“And you believed her?”
“If I didn’t, you’d be dead.”
“Never trust a dame, especially if she’s your wife.”
“Shut up, you idiot!” screamed the Teenager. “He’s giving you a chance!”
PayDay pressed the gun to the Actor’s temple. The sweaty drip of hair dye splashed like black tears into the yellow bathwater.
The Actor tried to squirm away from the gun. “Wait! I know Judy Garland! I can get you a blow job from Dorothy of Oz! That little girl can whistle while she works!”
Before PayDay could answer, the door banged open.
Leaping Larry Lizard stood framed in the doorway, his gun poised, the slab of his face purple with rage. He kicked the door closed behind him. “What the fuck are you doing? First you fuck up on the shooter, now you fuck up on this!”
“The shooter wasn’t in the room,” PayDay said. “There was only a maid in the hall.”
“The maid was the shooter, asshole! And you were warned not to shoot this dickhead yet!”
The Actor croaked and slipped lower in the water. “Pleeeease!”
“Now you have to shoot the prick, he knows too much!”
“What about the girl?”
“Her too! No witnesses!”
“Yeah, okay.” PayDay turned his gun toward the bed.
The Teenager pulled her bony knees up to her skinny chest. “Oh-my-God! Oh-my-God! I’m too young to die!”
PayDay took aim at the Teenager. In a split second he jerked the gun to the left, ripping six bullets off into Lizard’s face, pulverizing it into a mess of flesh and bone. Lizard’s body thumped back against the door and slid to the floor.
The Teenager screamed as PayDay aimed the gun at her again. “Oh-my-God! Oh-my-God! I beg you, no!”
PayDay walked over to the Teenager and handed her his gun. She held it, trembling, confused.
PayDay reached down and picked up Lizard’s pistol.
The Teenager swung her gun at PayDay and pulled the trigger: click-click-click.
PayDay grinned. “It’s empty.” He turned Lizard’s gun toward the Actor in the tub. “But this one isn’t.”
The Actor sank completely beneath the water, an eruption of bubbles churning up above his terrified face.
PayDay blasted away.
The wall behind the bathtub shattered, tile fragments flew through the air.
The Actor couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He popped his head above the water, gasping for air in gulping sobs.
PayDay kicked Lizard’s body away from the door. He leaned down and placed the gun in Lizard’s limp hand. Then he took out a PayDay wrapper from his coat pocket and shoved it into the hole where Lizard’s mouth had been.
PayDay turned to the Teenager. “Tell the cops Lizard broke into the room and tried to rape you. But you shot him. Say the gun in your hand belongs to the Actor.”
The Teenager’s face was white with fear. She pointed to the PayDay wrapper protruding from the bloody pulp on the floor. “What about that? What’s it mean?”
PayDay ran his hand over his bald head and grinned. “So the Right Guys will know … they can take this island and shove it. Me and my little lady are on the next plane out of here.”
3.
Love and War
King Bongo looked through his office window. The late-afternoon clouds that had earlier piled up on one another and pummeled Obispo Street with rain had cleared, and evening’s purple shadows were beginning to fall. Bongo dialed the telephone on his desk. On the other end of the line, he heard the clamorous din in the Three Virgins Bar. He shouted into the mouthpiece to make himself heard.
“Is Sweet Maria there?”
“No” came the annoyed reply. “Stop calling here. She won’t be back.”
“She could change her mind.”
“She won’t.” The line went dead.
Bongo wearily rested his head in his hands, thinking about how Maria gave him the slip at the Nacional. When she hadn’t come out of the ladies’ lounge, he pounded on the locked door until a Señorita Pee-Pee opened it. He asked where the maid was. The señorita insisted there had been no maid. The señorita was dressed in a drab hotel dress, she had the demeanor of a school principal, not of someone who would work in such a menial position. Behind her desk was a locked door, but she refused to open it. Bongo dropped a peso into her gratuity bowl. Without a word, she handed him a key. He unlocked the door and stepped out, surprised to be overlooking the sunning deck of the hotel swimming pool. He saw Zapata’s men, Pedro and Paulo, demanding to see everyone’s identification papers. Bongo quickly stepped back inside the lounge and locked the door. He knew that Maria was long gone.
Bongo dialed the phone on his desk again. This time, the voice of a young woman answered.
“Armstrong residence.”
Bongo recognized the voice; it was the pretty woman in the sundress. “Sorry to bother you. Is Mrs. Armstrong back from the funeral yet?”
“I told you earlier, she won’t be back until late. Then she’s packing to return to New York.”
“Tell her I have something for her.”
“You already asked me to do that.”
“You won’t forget?”
“I don’t forget messages.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
The woman cut the connection.
Bongo suspected that Mrs. Armstrong was there and dodging him. He had gone out to her house, but the automatic driveway gate that had once magically opened for him no longer would. The grounds were patrolled by private security cops, so there was no point in trying to go over the fence.
Bongo glanced down at the newspaper on his desk. The front-page story was an even bigger event than Guy Armstrong’s having gone over the Male
cón wall in a ball of fire. The article was about a famous American actor who, on the day of the Big Race, had saved his niece from being raped by an intruder at the Capri Hotel. The newspaper sported a photograph of the actor, grinning beneath the dash of a clipped English mustache. He was quoted as having been in a heroic life-or-death struggle with the intruder before gunning him down, barely managing to save the virtue of his niece, who had been cowering in the bathtub. What kept the story alive was that all three of the players were Americans and that the dead man was an employee of the ritzy Nacional. There was a grisly shot of the victim, the face blown mostly away, and an ill-defined object was jammed into the mangled mouth.
The phone rang, jarring Bongo from his thoughts.
He picked it up. There was heavy breathing, then a click, then silence. This was the third time in the past hour that someone had called and then hung up.
Bongo decided he’d had enough for one day. He locked up the office and walked down the stairs. He stepped out onto Obispo Street and strolled up to the Ambos Mundos Hotel. Inside the open-air lobby an old gentleman, wearing a straw bowler hat and a once fashionable suit, tinkled out a slow bolero on a piano. Next to the piano player a skinny black girl in a pink starched dress scraped a soulful tune from a violin. At the long mahogany bar, there was the usual contingent of white female tourists, sitting on stools, leggs crossed, sipping cocktails through colorful plastic straws. The women gave Bongo the once-over. He smiled back but his heart wasn’t in it. He walked away, turning the corner onto narrow Oficios Street, crowded with centuries-old noble mansions that were now subdivided among numerous families. Above the weathered doorways, stone-chiseled heraldic coats of arms were nearly worn away by time, and from the rusted balconies laundry hung. The scent of roasting chicken, boiling pork and steaming rice and beans drifted from open kitchens, where women bent over hot stoves and bare-armed men in T-shirts read newspapers. Walking this street, between groups of laughing children kicking balls, always sank Bongo into murky memories. He was reminded of when he had a family in El Fanguito, until that day when the river rose up in a hurricane fury, ripping his father away and delivering his sister into Zapata’s arms.
Bongo turned the corner into San Francisco Plaza and stopped at the Fountain of the Lions. The slouching white-marble beasts were gathered around a gurgling waterspout. Across the plaza, inside the Baroque Church of San Francisco de Assisi, the crypts held the bones of conquering Spanish lords. Pigeons landed on top of the church’s spiraling tower, which once was the highest point in the city, the highest man-made point in all of the Americas.
Bongo crossed over to Teniente Rey Street, following it until he emerged onto Plaza Vieja, Havana’s Colonial heart. Here, all the architectural splendor that the spoils of a raped land could afford had been imaginatively conjured. The buildings were supported by soaring Pantheonic columns, but the modern-day President and his men had transformed the plaza’s center into a parking lot; the beginning of a plan to demolish Old Havana, from the simplest adobe hut to the most eccentric Baroque palace, replacing all with towers of steel and glass.
Bongo felt he was the last man walking through a delusional dreamscape. When he got close to his apartment, he always stopped to read the bronze plaque that was Havana’s oldest traffic sign: CALLE DE RICA, IN MEMORY OF HIS EXCELLENCY THE COUNT OF RICA, SENT BY HIS MAJESTY TO RESTORE THIS CITY. YEAR 1763. The count had smashed an occupation by the English and again brought the iron fist of Spain down on the island. Bongo wondered what leader would arrive next, on a white horse or on the wings of a white dove, to declare the city his. Maybe it wouldn’t be a man leading an army this time, but an invasion of greenback U.S. dollars, infiltrating every bank and every pocket, billions of capitalist ghost bullets striking at the heart of every citizen. Bongo didn’t consider himself immune; such seductive bullets were hard to dodge.
Bongo’s apartment was in a once majestic five-story mansion built for Spanish royalty. He unlocked the old iron gate that guarded the mansion’s patio. Surrounding the patio were tiered terraces crowded with potted plants, bicycles, and clattering refrigerators. Bongo climbed the tiled steps of the staircase to the top floor, unlocked his door and stepped inside. He took a deep breath, gazing out over a field of flowers.
Orchids were everywhere, fragile beauties and robust specimens, in small pots and giant urns, in bookcases, on the floor, on tables and window ledges. Bongo didn’t have Mr. Wu’s teeming jungle of rarities, but he was proud of his brood. Among the exotica his phone was ringing. He grabbed it.
“Hello?”
No answer.
“Hello?”
The line clicked and went dead.
Bongo was certain someone was tracking him. Sooner or later, he’d find out who it was. He decided not to worry about it. He poured himself a glass of rum and walked out onto the rooftop terrace. He took a swig and breathed deeply, the alcohol’s tingling sensation in his nostrils mixed with orchid perfume. What he wanted to smell most was the scent of cinnamon and vanilla, the provocative drift of his Vanda. He couldn’t get her fragrant memory out of his mind, especially after he drank a second rum and the memories of New Year’s Eve rushed in. Then his heart clenched in a fist of pain, leaving him with nothing but sorrow over a dead girlfriend and a lost sister. He poured another rum; damned if he was going to let self-pity get the better of him.
He gazed out across the skyline. The buildings of Havana were streaked with lavender light and the atmosphere was charged with the mystery of oncoming night. Across the rooftops, he could see the life-sized Mercury perched on the dome of the nineteenth-century Commercial Exchange building. The bronzed god had turned an ethereal green with age, but he remained eternally young, one foot raised as he prepared to fly off in his winged helmet. Bongo raised his glass in a salute to Mercury. The race goes to the swift.
Below him, Bongo could see the Luz Docks. An American cruise ship was berthed, its profile illuminated by glittering lights strung the length of its deck. Beyond the ship, a ferry chugged through the water toward Casablanca. From this distance, Casablanca had the look of a medieval town, rising up in rowed streets of whitewashed houses. On Casablanca’s summit stood an unfinished marble statue of Christ, fifty feet high and headless, caged within steel scaffolding. Finished, he would be taller than the Christ overlooking Rio. He had one arm raised to the sky in what was intended as a benevolent blessing to the people of Havana, but since the arm had no hand, the gesture seemed bluntly hostile. One day the Christ would be completed and take his place in the record books as the largest sculpture in the world created by a woman. Bongo raised his glass in praise to the headless wonder. Behind Bongo a loud commotion erupted.
Zapata’s men, Pedro and Paulo, barged through the unlocked apartment door, knocking down orchids and stomping them underfoot as they charged toward Bongo, their guns drawn.
Bongo shouted at the blundering bulls, “Don’t hurt the flowers!”
Pedro and Paulo grabbed Bongo’s arms, twisting them up behind his back. The glass of rum in his hand flew over the terrace railing and shattered in the street below.
“Don’t give us any trouble,” Pedro growled.
“I’m not, but those orchids are innocents. Don’t rough them up.”
“We wouldn’t dare to hurt your little friends,” Paulo mocked.
“Nice of you boys to telephone earlier and say you were coming,” Bongo said.
“No wise talk.” Paulo jerked Bongo’s arm up painfully.
Pedro pulled Bongo’s gun from its holster. “Forget about this.” He threw the gun to the floor.
“Let’s get going,” Paulo urged. “We’re late.”
“Yeah,” Pedro agreed. “If orchid boy had stayed at his office we’d be right on time.”
Pedro and Paulo handcuffed Bongo and hustled him out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the backseat of Zapata’s black Plymouth.
Bongo waited for them to get in, then asked, “Where to, friends? The police s
tation, or the Blue Mansion?”
Pedro turned from the front seat and knocked Bongo across the mouth with the back of his hand. “I told you, no lip.”
Bongo tasted blood.
Paulo started the Plymouth and steered it into traffic.
“Put on some Beny Moré,” Pedro said.
“I’ll see if I can find some.” Paulo spun the radio dial, hunting through a jumble of voices and music. “Shit, no Beny. How about this?” He stopped on a station with a pathetic whiny voice singing about a little white cloud that cried.
“What’s that crap?” Pedro asked.
“That American guy, Johnnie Ray.”
“You know I can’t understand English. Kill that canary.”
Paulo changed the station. “How about this?”
“That’s more like it! Beny himself, the Barbarian of Rhythm!”
“Rumba, rumba, rumba!”
The Plymouth sped through the narrow streets of Old Havana and then onto the broad boulevards of central downtown. When the car approached the police station, it did not slow down. The Plymouth swerved onto the Malecón, roared along the oceanside highway, past La Rampa, past Vedado, through the tunnel under the Almendares River and up onto Fifth Avenue. The Spanish-style clock tower loomed ahead, the black hand pointed to 9. The Plymouth turned toward Miramar Beach and pulled up before an ornate two-story mansion, plastered an intense indigo blue and surrounded by bright green bayonet-pointed cacti.
Pedro and Paulo pulled Bongo out of the Plymouth and marched him up to the mansion’s entrance. A guard with a rifle swung open a massive wooden door. Pedro and Paulo pushed Bongo inside, past the marble foyer, through a series of rooms with half-finished walls, exposed electrical wires and tilted posts propping up ceilings. The deeper into the mansion the men went, the gloomier it became, each room more unfinished than the last, until they emerged into what was intended to be the mansion’s kitchen. A white porcelain sink ran the length of the room’s back wall. The sink and wall were spattered with blood.
Pedro and Paulo pushed Bongo down into a chair at a wooden chopping-block table. Above the table, a cord hung down with a lighted bare bulb casting a sharp glare.
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