Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  “I’m going to see your brother-in-law Max and ask if I can write for his newspaper.”

  “He is very much in love with me but I don’t read his newspaper, which is for the tourists who do not need much news. But he is very intelligent and he seems to know everybody in Cuba. He talks literature with my friend Alejo Carpentier, he plays golf with Bing Crosby, and he has lunch with the gangster Trafficante.”

  “Will you ask him to hire me?”

  “He will hire you without my asking. He always needs writers. They come and go like gypsies.”

  “Will you reconsider dinner with me tonight?”

  “I think it’s not the best night.”

  “Maybe it will turn out to be the best.”

  “You are persistent, but I must go back.”

  Quinn walked her into the museum and to an office where the guides gathered between tours. He was about to say he would come back to see her later in the day, but she saw something behind him and her face registered dark surprise. She walked away from Quinn and toward a man entering the museum. She stopped and talked into the man’s face, intimate talk. Then she shook her head. The man talked while she listened and she nodded yes. She looked around the museum to see if they were being watched, and they were. He put his arms around her and kissed her, held her, then went out the way he came. Renata saw that people had seen the kiss. How could they not? She came back to Quinn and said, “I cannot talk any more.”

  “That was the lover who is the king?” Quinn said.

  “Yes,” she said. Tears came to her eyes and she went into the office.

  Quinn had been reading the Havana Post for a week, thinking its twelve pages did not leave much room for him, but maybe he’d make room. It was a brisk, pop sheet with Earl Wilson and Winchell, Blondie and Alley Oop, ship arrivals, an Anglo-American social calendar, headline stories from the AP, and whatever local, sports, and social news the rest of the space could handle. When Quinn entered the city room only four people were at work: a barrel-chested old man with white hair and brown skin reading galley proofs at a long table; a fine-featured brunette in her forties, alone on the rim of the copy desk editing wire copy; a tall black man who with two-fingered typing seemed to be translating a story from a Spanish-language newspaper; and Max Osborne, with open-collared shirt and tie, reading that same newspaper at his desk in a glass cubicle. Quinn crossed the room, tapped on Max’s glass and stood in his doorway.

  “I asked Renata to urge you to hire me,” Quinn said, “but she said you’d hire me without her. Is that true?”

  “Hemingway likes your writing, is that true?”

  “He’s never seen a word of it. His praise of my novel was fiction.”

  “We don’t publish fiction here.”

  “I brought you some clips.” Quinn put an envelope on Max’s desk.

  “Are you any good?”

  “I’m uniquely talented. Read me.”

  Max opened the envelope of clips, a few feature pieces Quinn had written for the Albany Times Union, and a dozen articles about Cubans for the Miami Herald, one on the two pro-Castro factions, one faction without money, one flush and probably CIA; also an interview with Carlos Prío, the president ousted by Batista’s 1952 coup. Prío fled to Miami with millions in public money, but denied to Quinn that he was spending it on guns for rebels to bring down Batista.

  “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Suficiente. I can get along.”

  “You talked to Prío.”

  “I saw him handing out cash in his hotel suite. People were lined up in the hallway waiting to beg money to feed the family, or get out of debt, or bring a relative off the island, or hire on for the next invasion. His assistant had a stack of cash on a table and if Prío liked what he heard he’d say, ‘Give him an inch,’ and the assistant with his six-inch ruler would measure off a bit of the pile and send the beggar away with a smile.”

  “I like your sentences,” Max said after skimming the clips. “I’ll hire you if you write something valuable.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “I can do maybe two pieces a week. I’ve got a novel to write.”

  “Two pieces will do if they’re good.”

  “What about my press credentials?”

  “You move fast.”

  “Get your story in the first paragraph.”

  “You’ll get a press card if I buy your story.”

  “I may need a card to get the story.”

  “I’ll give you a note.” And Max typed on a Post letterhead: “The bearer is a reporter on a three-day news assignment for this newspaper. Please grant him all normal courtesies.” He dated it and typed his name and signed it illegibly.

  “Why are you in Havana?”

  “It’s closer than Paris,” Quinn said. “I followed my nose, and it led here. I thought Miami would be exotic, but it’s pointless. Havana has a point. In Albany they merely steal elections. Here they put a pistol in the president’s ear while they show him the door.”

  “I know Albany. It had very entertaining corruption, and it was wide open, like Havana. I went there on weekends with a classmate.”

  “Albany’s corruption is still in bloom and its sin is eternal.”

  “That’s comforting. You know Alex Fitzgibbon?”

  “Everybody knows the Mayor.”

  “We were at New Haven together. He comes here now and then.”

  “Wait a minute. Were you at Alex’s house when Bing Crosby was there? Nineteen thirty-six?”

  “I was.”

  “So was I. I was a kid.”

  “Sure. And your father got Bing a piano and he and Cody Mason sang ‘Shine.’”

  “Right. My father now works for Alex in the court system.”

  “And here you are, trying to work for me. Yale runs in your family.”

  “I don’t work for you yet.”

  “But you’re trying. My daughter, Gloria, goes to convent school in Albany.”

  “If we talk long enough it’ll turn out we’re first cousins.”

  “Coincidence isn’t all that coincidental. How do you know Hemingway?”

  “I introduced myself last night. He ever behave like that before?”

  “Not quite like that, but yes. That fellow he punched out called this morning and wants us to tell his story. But Hemingway’s not news when he punches somebody. If they arrest him, maybe, but now it’s a dogbite story.”

  “Renata didn’t think so.”

  “Renata. I saw how she got to you. Everybody goes ga-ga. She’s easy to love, but she’s not easy. She’s tough.”

  “I told her I was ready to marry her. She’s thinking it over.”

  “You do get your story in the first paragraph.”

  “That fellow who sang for us, Papa’s punching bag, where’s he staying?”

  “Cooney? He’s at the Regis.”

  “Maybe I’ll go apologize to him for Papa.”

  “He’s not a story either.”

  “I could interview him as a composer.”

  “Dog bites composer. It’s still not a story.”

  Renata could not find Diego, her fine and dangerous lover, for good reason: he had been acuartelado in an apartment house in the Vedado with fifty-two other men for four days, waiting for the signal to attack the Presidential Palace and kill the dictator. Simultaneously fifteen other attackers led by José Antonio Echevarría, the leader of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, would leave from another apartment to take over Radio Reloj and announce to all Cuba that Batista was dead. Days and nights passed, the cool moon yielding to new morning and the return of smothering heat in the apartment, for no windows could be opened. Whispers, no other sounds, were permitted, for the young men’s presence here was secret. Read, don’t talk. Sleep, don’t snore. Only five at a time can smoke, and only by the window in the back room. Nobody goes out except Carlos, the leader of the attack, and Diego, who will drive the streets of Old Hava
na in Carlos’ car to estimate the presence of soldiers.

  The attack had been set for the twelfth until Diego and Carlos, on the morning of the eleventh, found Calle Colón blocked to all traffic. Only the Colón entrance to the south wing of the Palace offered a door to be breached. That south wing faced Bellas Artes across Zayas Park. On the early morning of the thirteenth the street was still blocked, but an inside informant said the dictator had stayed the night in the Palace, and was there now. At eleven o’clock the barriers were gone, traffic was again moving, and Carlos and Diego drove onto Colón. A soldier with a machine gun was monitoring a car as it entered the south wing’s driveway; so yes, access was possible. That soldier could be the first to die.

  “We should go to Bellas Artes now,” Diego said to Carlos as they moved. They saw Military Intelligence cars parked nearby. Diego went into the museum and found no troops, no SIM agents. Renata was talking to an Americano. She saw Diego and came to him.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “Don’t talk. Today you must work here all day.”

  “I’m supposed to finish at two,” she said.

  “Work till six. We may need you to drive someone.”

  “What are you talking about? What is happening?”

  “Don’t go out of the museum. Stay inside and work all day, do you hear me?”

  “I hear.”

  “Do you have your mother’s car?”

  “No.”

  “My car is on Agramonte. The key is in the ashtray. If you don’t see me later drive it someplace safe and leave it. Someone will call you about where you put it.”

  “Why won’t you drive it? Won’t I see you later?”

  “Who can say?”

  He kissed her with a fierce mouth and squeezed the life in her body. Then he said good-bye my love, and went back to Carlos in the car.

  At two that afternoon the fifty-three Palace attackers who had been acuartelados wrapped their Thompsons and Garands into the bedding they had slept on, came down the stairs silently in pairs, and climbed into the Fast Delivery panel truck parked by the side door. Four men, including the leaders, would ride in each of two cars. As the vehicles were being loaded two men turned coward. Carlos said he couldn’t shoot them now because of the noise, but they would be held in the apartment at gunpoint by a comrade wounded in an earlier shooting. Maybe he would shoot them later. They knew this was a suicidal mission. We can kill Batista or they can kill us all.

  The attack proceeded: Carlos driving the lead car, with Diego and two others, and the Fast Delivery truck following with forty-two men. The truck was unbearably hot, without light, and so overloaded that its six tires were nearly flat. The second car, driven by Aurelio, second in command, with three others, followed the truck. The plan was that once the three vehicles had breached the entrance, another hundred fighters in trucks and cars would arrive shooting heavy weapons, certain to demoralize Palace guards into flight. If the first wave found Palace access impossible, the attack would move against a secondary target—the Cuartel Maestre, the armory of the police—where they would seize its arms, then move to another police station for more arms. There would be no going back. The vehicles moved at inchworm pace through dense traffic. Menelao Mora, at fifty-three the oldest man in the truck, and an ex-legislator in the Cámara and former ally of Prío, told his young comrades what to expect, how to move and never stop. Machadito, holding the rope that kept the rear door from flapping open, saw his girlfriend crossing Aguila and said, “Mi amor, allí está,” and his comrades stared at him.

  The truck turned onto Ánimas, the driver’s mistake, and separated from the two cars. Carlos and Aurelio both waited for it to catch up at the Prado, and when the three vehicles were again in tandem they moved onto Colón, and there it was. Carlos very suddenly careened into the Palace driveway, hit the brakes and bolted from the car firing his M-1, running under the arcade of the Palace’s gate, his surprise so perfect that the guards did not slam the gate shut or realize it was time to do that, or even see who was firing the machine gun that was killing them. Diego was behind Carlos, and Aurelio, leaping from the second car, took out the two guards shooting at Carlos’ back. Then others jumped out of the truck—Machadito and Carbó and Menelao setting the pace, the rest in twos and threes shooting, remembering Menelao’s advice—don’t crouch, don’t stop—run to the Palace wall out of the line of high fire from the upper terraces. But those machine guns roared, riddling the truck and pavement with such a hail of bullets that clouds of stone dust rose around the men who instinctively sought cover or stasis in the face of the impenetrable and died throwing a grenade or shooting at the sky. Carlos opened the gate and yelled, “Arriba, muchachos, it’s ours!” Diego moved through the gate after him and the Palace was breached according to plan.

  On the third floor of Bellas Artes, Renata was explaining to seventy American and English tourists that the young woman in the painting was named Sikan and she had met the sacred fish, Tanze, quite by accident. But for both it was a fateful meeting, for young Sikan would be kidnapped and dismembered as a sacrifice in order to recover the lost voice of the gods which was the voice of the fish. Why it was also fateful for the fish Renata did not have time to explain for the bullets came in through the front windows and then the screaming and warning yells—they’re shooting! Renata now realized Diego would die.

  She yelled to the tourists, Get down, somebody’s shooting. Who’s shooting? What does it matter who’s shooting if they shoot you, get down you fool get down, and the fool got down. Renata knew Diego was now shooting at somebody and somebody was shooting at him. He was saying, We will kill the devil, we will butcher the butcher, as he entered the Palace with his M-1. That young man of such culture and knowledge and courage and beauty would be a sacrifice today. Renata listened as he whispered to her: Be careful, they will know I love you and will remember I kissed you, I shouldn’t have, but now they will question you about me and you must tell them we only talked about painting and Santeria and of course they will believe you, for you look so innocent. He was shooting now and he will kill before he is killed. The guardia at the Palace will also deliver sacrifices today. She could see Diego shooting on the Palace stairs, so agile, so alert to the living instant, and she crawled to the museum’s stairs to see everybody below, all crouching or flattened by the guns, which stopped, began, stopped, began. Why are they firing at Bellas Artes? We have no guns.

  Diego saw Aurelio hit and lifted backward into the air and saw his pistol and grenades fly out from his belt. He saw Hernández, a year away from being a doctor, run toward the gate and die in a sprawl. Castellanos came yelling, “Lo logramos,” we got it, and shot a guard who had left his machine gun and was running back into the Palace.

  The Fast Delivery was full of holes and Gómez sat behind it, waving his arms, already dead, the cement dust billowing around him. Diego saw Aurelio shake himself and stand up, without a weapon. The ground floor was empty of guards but bullets kept raining down across the open patio. Diego moved upstairs onto the left wing of the Palace’s second floor with four others—Carlos, Almeida, Goicoechea, and Castellanos.

  Five others had made their way up and along the second floor’s right wing and from there Machadito lit the fuse of a seven-stick dynamite bomb and threw it to the soldiers on the third floor—who thought it was artillery, and their firing stopped, momentarily.

  The five on the left moved along corridors and when the phone rang in an empty room Diego answered it. The caller asked was it true as José Antonio announced on Radio Reloj that Batista was dead? And Diego answered, “Yes it is true, we have seized the Palace and killed Batista. Viva el Directorio!” Then he followed Carlos across a corridor toward Batista’s office. But the map from Prío showed an opening where now there was a locked door.

  Carlos shot the door, which opened into a dining room—dirty dishes on a table and three servants crouching in a corner. Goicoechea wanted to martyr them, but Carlos said no. He aske
d where was Batista? They said he’d just had lunch but they didn’t know where he went.

  “A singar,” Diego said, fuck!—and he ran toward the Hall of Mirrors and to the glass door into Batista’s antechamber. Diego heard voices beyond the door and called to them to surrender and a gunshot shattered the glass door in reply. Carlos tossed a grenade through the broken glass but it did not explode; he threw another, then a third, duds all. Diego dropped in a grenade that blew off the door and they entered the Batista sanctum shooting at two corpses.

  The butcher has fled.

  They looked on Prío’s map for the secret passage to the third floor but found nothing. From the Hall of Mirrors balustrade they looked down at a dozen patrol cars on the Avenida de las Misiones where police, shielded by trees, fired up at them. They found their way across to the right wing to meet the five who were now four: Menelao shot, unable to get up, Machadito, Carbó and Prieto all firing upward, and Brinas dead in front of them.

  Carlos tested the stairs going up but fell back from the shooting and said we need our backup men, I’ll get them, and before Carbó could stop him he went toward the down stairway where Brinas had been shot and ran under the fusillade that was the last thing to touch his life.

  Diego was hit but running. “I’ll cover your retreat,” said Machadito, and his machine gun silenced the troops above while Carbó and Prieto and Goicoechea made their way down, and then the last five were out of the Palace, all bleeding and running from the guns on the Palace roof.

  Carbó was running with Diego toward Bellas Artes, but the gunners on the roof hit both—Carbó’s arm, yet he kept running, and Diego, his shirt covered with the blood of others, who went facedown into the water of the Zayas fountain. The others kept on toward Montserrate, shooting at anything coming after them, anything ahead of them that impeded their way to someplace else.

  Quinn sat in a fifth-floor mini-suite at the Hotel Regis, studying the shape of Cooney’s head bandage, which looked like a turban wrapped by a one-handed Arab, absurd enough to match the cause of the injury, large enough to match the reputation of the man who caused it. Cooney wasn’t clear on Quinn’s purpose in coming here, nor was Quinn. Cooney doubtless paired Quinn with Hemingway as the enemy, but Quinn had apologized in his call from the house phone, asking for a meeting to explain what he was not sure he could explain. He would not claim illness or pathological aggression for Hemingway; but the subject needed examination. It still might turn into an article for Max, but Quinn didn’t need that either. He was out to affix reality onto experience for himself, maybe also for Cooney, and rescue the event from drift into fistic barroom legend that would otherwise end with a whimper as the stretcher exits the Floridita and another right cross and a left hook from Hemingway become a footnote in the archive. There was more to it than that.