Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  One of Cooney’s pals from Jersey sat beside him with narrow eyes and a pushed-out lip, keeping watch on this visitor who might be bringing new trouble. Quinn remembered the man from the bar. He didn’t speak and Cooney didn’t introduce him.

  “How’s your head?” Quinn asked.

  “They say the skull’s not cracked, just cut and swelled up,” Cooney said. “But that son of a pup ain’t heard the last of Joe Cooney, I kid you not.”

  “Are you a vengeful man, Mr. Cooney?”

  “Revenge? I’m sure as hell gonna get me some.”

  “You’ve got a right. But I should warn you—he’s got money and power down here. And he’s very famous, and well-loved.”

  “They love him? Don’t he punch out any Cubans?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s no stranger to fights. But he’s king of the Floridita. That’s his domain.”

  “King of a barroom.”

  “And of everybody who walks into it.”

  “How’d he get to be such a big shot?”

  “He wrote some great books.”

  “That don’t seem enough.”

  “He also fights in all the wars.”

  “I fought in the Pacific. Got a Silver Star.”

  “If he knew that he wouldn’t have hit you.”

  “Why’d he hit me?”

  “He had a problem with your song. He also likes power and thinks you get it with your fists or your gun. He’s a serious hunter.”

  “So am I.”

  “You and he have a lot in common.”

  “He send you here to see what I’m gonna do?”

  “No. I only met him for the first time myself last night.”

  “Hit me a sucker punch, for what?”

  “I agree it was barbaric.”

  “Whatever the hell that means.”

  “It means savage, uncivilized. The primitive arrogance of force. Crude exercise of the ego. Everybody’s an enemy who isn’t himself. Nothing personal, now, but he sees you as a cipher, a zero, a cliché, a mark. Fair game for lofty thinkers.”

  “Shit,” said Cooney’s friend, and he stood up from his chair.

  Quinn heard the fireworks outside, then explosions. Cooney’s friend opened the louvered screen doors and went onto the balcony overlooking the street and Zayas Park.

  “They’re shootin’ down there,” the friend said. “Cops or soldiers looks like.”

  Quinn and Cooney stood up to look out. Uniformed men were shooting at people near the Palace. The street was chaotic, people running, crouching behind cars, in doorways, traffic stopped, police firing at civilians who were shooting machine guns. Machine-gun fire strafed a bus and shattered its windshield, and the bus driver climbed the sidewalk. A soldier in the turret of a tanqueta, an armored truck, looked up at the front of the Regis, then turned his machine gun and raised it. Quinn said, “Look out!” and instinctively backed inside and hit the floor as the soldier fired. Cooney’s friend fell backward across the threshold with bullets in his chest. Cooney, splattered with blood, stood staring at his friend but Quinn grabbed his wrist and said, “Down, Cooney, down,” and pulled him to the floor. Quinn crawled toward the door as more bullets came through the louvered doors and hit the wall, and plaster showered onto Quinn and Cooney.

  “What is this Cuba for chrissake?” Cooney said. “They hit you for nothin’ and they shoot you for standin’ outside, even inside, and you didn’t do a goddamn thing to them, this is fucking rotten hell if I ever saw it.”

  “Good reason to keep your head down,” Quinn said. “Maybe they think you’re a sniper. They don’t know you’re a tourist. Crawl to the hallway, head down. What’s your friend’s name who was shot?”

  “Chet Looby.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Baltimore, same as me. Why you askin’ me questions?”

  “I keep track of stuff,” Quinn said.

  He crawled past a room where loud music was playing, a Cuban song he recognized, one of the few he could name, a son, “Lágrimas Negras.” He equated it with old death in Cuba as announced on the Miami Herald’s newswire, or rebels dead in the street trying to get rid of Machado, or the distant slaughter in the Mambí revolution his grandfather had written about—slaves and rebels on horseback, hacking out a mythic path with their machetes, a prelude to today’s diorama of corpses baking on sidewalks in the park, a newly blooming garden of rebel death. In his historical memory these warriors fell without bleeding but now the gore was personal for Quinn, its splatter visible on his trousers, and he could hear its music. On the streets below, the attack wave of the new sacrificial generation was becoming aware that bleeding to death was its destiny and that suicide-in-arms is a noble choice of exit from a righteous war. And Black Tears from on high fell onto these very necessary corpses.

  The hundred young rebels in the second wave, now sitting in cars, trucks or houses, waiting, could hear no music. Some heard on Radio Reloj that the attack had begun, some could hear the calamity of the Palace machine guns, but their leader, struck with indecision, could give no signal to attack those guns. And so the first wave was massacred and the president preserved.

  The force of survival is as unconsciously fierce as the charge toward fatal heroism is willful. In the land of perpetual revolution, one never knows toward what one moves.

  As Quinn and Cooney came down the stairs into the lobby a woman in hysterics ran in from the street, a bellman moved to lock the doors, but another half dozen squeezed through after her; and then the doors were sealed against further sanctuary. People pounded the door in vain. Quinn saw two dozen people already sheltered in corridors off the lobby, away from windows and stray or not-so-stray bullets. Quinn and Cooney walked down the hallway past the refugees, and behind a half-open door found a man of managerial air venting anguish into the telephone. Quinn pushed Cooney toward the man and said, “An American tourist, name of Chet Looby from Baltimore, was just shot dead by street fire in five-oh-three, and this man is his friend and saw it happen.” The manager’s face registered panic as Quinn turned toward the corridor and said, “See you later, Mr. Cooney.” Cooney gave a don’t-go gesture, but Quinn was already gone.

  When the police came to talk to Cooney they would advise him to say a random shot killed his friend; but Cooney would insist, “They pointed guns up at us, two soldiers did, and then they machine-gunned us. Wasn’t nothin’ random about it.” The American embassy and the Cuban government both vowed to investigate Cooney’s view of events. The day’s early death count would be forty-seven rebels, six soldiers, and maybe a half a dozen civilians: the Chinese bus driver, who would die while his head wound was being treated at a military hospital, two of his twelve wounded passengers, both children, also Chet Looby, and who knows who else? Joe Cooney would find his blue seersucker sports coat riddled in his closet by machine gun fire. A painting in Bellas Artes, A Faun and a Young Girl by Rubens, would be cut in half by a blast from a fifty-caliber gun on the tanqueta, and the façade of the museum would be so ravaged by gunfire it would close for fifteen days.

  Rebels and Palace guards would shoot each other for forty-five minutes. Firing from rooftops and streets, echoing from sites remote from the Palace, would go on for three hours, and Renata would keep her tourist visitors on the floor of the museum for more than two hours. One man in her charge would suffer a heart attack, four others would be cut by flying glass, and two women would faint and be slapped awake by Renata. After the third hour’s final silence the museum’s director would tell Renata that Diego’s corpse had been found in the fountain of Zayas Park, and that the Military Intelligence Service, SIM, had been asking if anyone in the museum knew Diego, and someone said that Renata did.

  “I knew him only through painting and sculpture, as a man of the arts,” Renata told the director.

  “Of course,” he said. “Now go home and stay there and don’t talk about Diego.”

  Quinn called Max four times from a pay phone to update the attac
k, the street scene, the sprawl of corpses. He dictated a story on the sudden death of Cooney’s friend and Max told him he was hired. When the shooting fell away to single sporadic shots in the distance, Quinn walked toward Bellas Artes to find Renata, but was stopped half a block away by soldiers. He explained his work and showed his letter from Max, which the soldier could not read. A woman came out of the museum and Quinn asked her if she’d carry a message to Renata, and she agreed. Two men from SIM came out and took Quinn into the museum and asked how he knew Renata, this woman who knows rebels. Did Quinn know any rebels? He showed them his passport and Max’s letter, and one of the men telephoned Max, who vouched for Quinn.

  Quinn’s first-person story of death at the Palace and death on a hotel balcony would be carried internationally with his byline by the Associated Press, in the week ahead Time would hire him as a stringer, and Quinn the newcomer would suddenly be a Havana newsman with cachet.

  “Diego was in the attack. He’s dead,” Renata said, her first words as they left the museum. “Now, because I know him, they don’t trust me.”

  “They don’t trust me because I know you. But they didn’t arrest either of us. Here you are. Here I am.”

  “You came to see me. You are a thoughtful man.”

  “I thought I’d take you home. I know they’ve been shooting at you.”

  “My mother is in collapse. She thinks I’m dead. But I can’t go home. I have to know if Diego is truly dead. I want to go to the necrocomio, where they take the bodies.”

  “Don’t tempt the police to arrest you. They’re very, very nervous. I saw them kill a friend of that guy who sang for Hemingway.”

  “Oh no, oh the poor man. So many innocents killed. I’m sure I know many, many of the dead. I’m sure of it.”

  “I wrote the story of that man, and of the whole attack, for Max. He hired me.”

  “I knew he would.”

  They walked toward Agramonte.

  “Do you have a car?” she asked.

  “No. But I’ll find us a taxi,” Quinn said.

  “I have a car.”

  They walked, and when she saw Diego’s car she opened the door and sat at the wheel. She took the key from the ashtray as Quinn got into the 1952 Oldsmobile four-door with stains on its carpet. It smelled of oil.

  “Is this your car?” Quinn asked.

  “It is sometimes my car.” She put her head on the wheel and sobbed.

  “I can drive,” Quinn said.

  “Better if a woman is driving.” She raised her head and started the car. “This is Diego’s car.”

  “Diego’s? Jesus, Renata, are you crazy? They’ll be looking for it. They’re probably looking for it now.”

  “It really isn’t his,” she said. “It’s a stolen car.”

  “Oh, then there’s no problem. They never look for stolen cars.”

  “He said to park it someplace safe and wait for a call to tell someone where it is.”

  “You’re in serious danger in this car.”

  “I’ve been in serious danger for many months. Get out if you like.”

  “I said I’d take you home. Let’s go home. Your home.”

  “I can’t take this car home.”

  “Then take it someplace and let’s park it.”

  She pulled out into traffic, which was just beginning to move again. Hundreds were coming out of stores and offices, slowly and with curiosity, street vendors were back selling peanuts and peeled oranges, and two overfull buses were moving. People were walking backward in the street hailing rides.

  “I can’t give anybody a ride,” Renata said. “They might be killed if the police stop us.”

  “No point in getting anybody else killed,” Quinn said.

  She turned onto the Prado, still in tears. But the mood of her eyes was different from the rest of her face, less sad, more on edge, and he saw her capacity for dualities. Of course. Two lovers going on three, minus one.

  “How were you in serious danger for many months?” Quinn asked.

  “Riding with Diego. We would rent rooms for his friends to hide in, or to use for hiding guns. We said we were man and wife. I think we would have been.”

  “Then you’re a genuine gunrunner,” Quinn said.

  “Yes, and so are you. There are guns in this car. I knew as soon as I saw it. The rear end is very low.”

  Her passion had dried her tears and her eyes were evaluating how this sudden complicity with guns would change Quinn’s expression.

  “Do you like being a gunrunner?” she asked.

  “It’s delightful. I didn’t know how beautiful my fellow gunrunners could be.”

  “Are you afraid of dying if the police catch us?”

  “Not at all. I’ll explain I’m writing a story about gunrunning.”

  “They will kill you anyway. They kill anybody with guns, anybody.”

  Quinn the gunrunner had fallen in love before he’d said hello to this woman, who seemed as guileful as she was innocent, primal polarities. She had offhandedly exposed him to intimate elements of her love affair with living-and-dead rebels, and had speculated aloud that Quinn might be on a waiting list. Her legs and thighs were on exhibition, skirt riding high as she drove, that skirt soiled from her time on the museum floor with seventy tourists. How had she kept them horizontal and alive? A persuasive presence. Now she confesses her clandestine movement of arms and turns him into an accomplice. Was this sudden inadvertence, willful intent, an inevitable truth she feels they should share? Who is he to be her confessor? Forces are in play, Quinn, which you are only beginning to confront. No American women in your life like this one, who’s taken up residence in your soul overnight: invasive onset by a creature who commandeers the imagination: exotic, perhaps deadly. What did you get yourself into?

  “You are ready to die,” he said to her. “Do you know why?”

  “Because I believe in the people I’ve been with. And because it is a form of love. It is not death you love but the nearness of death to the people you love and to yourself. And because it thrills me.”

  “You know what would thrill me?”

  “Tell me.”

  “If you parked this goddamn car.”

  “I know the perfect place,” she said. “They will never look there for guns. A beautiful house and it is closed. The owner is a very rich American woman who comes here only in winter. My sister lives nearby and we can borrow one of her cars.”

  They rode out Fifth Avenue and past the Havana Yacht Club, where Renata was a star golfer. They moved through Country Club Park where the American, British and Cuban social elites for decades had built their homes on rolling acres and great lawns that were emulations of the fairways of the Country Club’s golf course. Renata turned into a driveway bordering a fairway and toward an elegant white-stucco Spanish villa with a half-dozen adjoining buildings.

  “They had many parties here,” she said. “I came as a child and watched them at night on that hill, dancing the conga with torches.”

  “Who was this woman?”

  “Rene Fellows. She painted and wrote things and had money from her husband who ran a shipping line. She was one of Hemingway’s mistresses and she was beautiful. People say she had many men.”

  “That seems to be a popular pastime.”

  She drove to the rear of Rene Fellows’ house and parked in the covered driveway of a secondary building. She faced the car outward so anyone picking it up would not have to waste time turning it around. They were out of the sight line of neighboring houses. She put the keys in the ashtray.

  “Esme lives beyond those trees.”

  “I’d like to see the guns.”

  Renata retrieved the key and opened the trunk on one Browning automatic and tripod, six machine guns, several belts of cartridges, and six .45 caliber pistols.

  “I remember the Browning and the .45s from the army,” Quinn said, “but I never dealt with those machine guns.”

  “They are old Thompsons, and they
fit under the front seat of this car. I’ll tell you a story about that some day.” She closed the trunk and put the key back in the ashtray.

  “How much do you pay for this many guns?”

  “Thousands. I never do that part of it.”

  She led Quinn through a stand of banyans and flamboyans, laurels and coconut palms and a heavy growth of manigua, and when they came out on the crest of a hill she pointed toward a spectacle: an Italian Renaissance mansion with stairs and terraces sculpted into a hillside that ran to the beach.

  “My big sister’s ugly palace,” Renata said. “It is so big she had to put in an elevator. She married a rich Spaniard who died in a plane crash and left her a fortune. Her house has fourteen bedrooms. And Batista. She loves Batista because of his power. I think she would make sex with him if she could. I wonder if she has. I try very hard to love her the way I used to. Her second husband Moncho I love very much. They were only married six months and she left him because he was never home. He is a lawyer and a crazy person and is one of my favorite in-laws. He visits Esme all the time, and they get along better than when they were married.”

  “Where does Max come into this? I thought he was your brother-in-law.”

  “Max was her first husband but she divorced him in 1953. He moved back in when the Spaniard died. But they aren’t married.”