Havana Noir (16 page)

“
A den of vice and iniquity
is the usual phrase back home.”

“Sorry, it’s been five years since I left Bronx Science.”

“Hey, man, you speak English!” shouted David at Cesar, “I demand to see the American consul. I’m an American citizen!”

Cesar looked at him with awe, then back at me. “Jesus, where did you get this monkey?”

I shrugged.

“I said I am an American citizen and I—”

In a lightning swift motion, Cesar lifted his tommy gun and fired over David’s head, missing him by scant inches.

“The next time is right between the eyes, comemierda!”

David grew deadly still, his eyes bulged, and this time he nodded quietly. I had to grin.

“Just get them out of here,” said Cesar. “Guys like him never learn, they think being American makes them better than anybody else.”

“I understand. May I?” I gestured at my gun on the floor. “I have a feeling I might need it.”

He nodded. “You might. Everything’s closed down. You got a car?”

I bent down, picked up my .45. “Around the corner.”

“Make sure you got gas. Things are going to be pretty hairy the next few days, until Fidel comes down from the hills. Now beat it.”

“I didn’t catch your name.” I offered my hand.

He shook it, warmly. “Rolando Cubela. And you?”

“Jason Blue.”

“Well, Mister Private Detective Jason Blue, if I’m ever in California, I will give you a call. But you and your friends better fly the coop now.”

The crowds were all going at it as we drove through Chinatown up to the house in Siboney. An angry mob had surrounded the police station on Zanja, down the street from the theater. I caught sight of one lone officer still in his blue uniform thrown down the steps, kicked, and beaten with shoes, sticks, and brooms. All the stoplights had been shot out of commission, traffic piling up as pedestrians and cars swarmed the streets. Fireworks—Roman candles, rockets, firecrackers—exploded in Chinatown, celebrating a new year like no other. Bands of teenagers in convertibles leaned on car horns, waving giant flags with the black and red of Castro’s party, and the lone star Cuban flag, singing the national anthem and some other military song about libertad. Every so often I would also catch the strains of the “Internationale,” accompanied by riffs of machine-gun fire. On every street, men and women were attacking parking meters with the ferocity they wished they could have shown to Batista’s henchmen. Swinging sledgehammers, they struck until they beheaded the meters, coins spilling like so much blood on the ground, which people would scoop up in a little triumphant dance. I suppose a little craziness is to be expected when a dictator meets his end.

In the backseat, David had passed out on top of Raquel. She hugged him to her abundant chest like a mother while she worriedly looked out the window, taking in the chaos all around.

“Mister,” she said in Spanish, “are you sure you’ll be able to get us out of here with no trouble?”

“I don’t know about the trouble, but we have a boat waiting for us. In a few hours, at the muelle.”

“No aeropuerto?”

“Sure to be closed,” I said, still in Spanish. I know it sounds funny, but at that moment I wished that I spoke better Spanish. Now that I had gotten a good look at her in the rearview mirror, I realized what a magnificent specimen of femalehood she was. I wanted to comfort her in all the ways a man can for a woman, but all I could do was say it would be okay and drive on.

We parked at the corner of 180th Street between 15th and 17th in Siboney without incident. The hubbub was now worlds away, back around the capitol building, shining ghastly white with the floodlights turned on, as people streamed in and out, taking files, artwork, boxes of papers. I had never been in a revolution before, but in Korea I had seen how, when authority suddenly vanishes, it’s every man for himself. I figured with the usual snafus there wouldn’t be a single port or customs officer on duty to stop us.

Raquel helped me carry David inside. We laid him on the bed of the coach house I’d rented from a Canadian I’d met at the Bodeguita del Medio the night I got into town. The coach house—clearly the servant’s quarters—was behind a two-bedroom white house of fairly recent construction, modest by neighborhood standards. She lay down with him and I went to the kitchen to make myself some coffee. It was going to be a long night. I had told the captain of the boat to meet me at the dock at 7 in the morning with a full tank and food for the trip to Key West. It was now close to 3 and the efforts of a whole week of searching for David were finally beginning to take their toll.

I had eaten all my meals out since coming into town, so I had no idea what the Canadian’s kitchen contained. I strolled across the grass to the empty house. There was a fence around the property and bushes taller than me. I walked in through the terrace to the kitchen and opened up a few cupboards, uncovering crackers, a jar of pickled herring, and a bag with a log of dried meat called
pemmican
that smelled suspiciously of old socks. Finally, in the refrigerator, behind two bottles of Big Rock Ale, I found a can of finely ground coffee. However, hard as I looked, I could not find a percolator anywhere in the place.

“Te puedo servir?” asked Raquel from the kitchen door. She’d apparently followed me over.

She leaned her head on the doorframe, her wide doe eyes slightly closed from fatigue and sleeplessness. It wasn’t her eyes I was looking at, but her full figure, like a Maidenform bra ad, barely covered by the flimsy crocheted lace dress she’d thrown on at the Shanghai.

“I have coffee but no coffee maker,” I said in Spanish.

“It’s right there,” she said, entering the kitchen. She slid next to me, her jasmine perfume as intoxicating as Tennessee moonshine. She grabbed hold of a metal conical object with a lid. She opened it, took out a piece of cloth shaped like a windsock, then turned, displaying it like a model at a fancy department store.

“This is how we do it in Cuba,” she said, dumping the dried coffee grounds in the garbage and rinsing the cloth under the faucet. She bent down, picked up a small pot, put it under the faucet to fill.

I came in close behind her, pressed myself against her back, breathing in the smell of her body, her perfume, her excitement. She didn’t move away, she just extended her arm to place the pot on the stovetop.

“You see, we have to wait until the water boils and then we put in the coffee.”

She turned to face me, her head cocked sideways. “Maybe you have a light?”

I dug in my pocket, pulled out a box of waxy matches, and lit one. She took my hand, guided it to the burner under the pot, then turned to me again, still holding my hand in hers. The match was burning down to my fingertips but I didn’t care. She brought it to her lips and blew it out.

“Pobrecito,” she said. “You burned yourself.” She kissed my fingertips then stuck them in her mouth, softly suckling them.

I took my fingers out of her mouth and put my tongue in there instead. She suckled that too and soon we were down on the kitchen floor, her dress over her head, her arms held together as though by a lacy rope as her full breasts with her big brown nipples bumped against my chest while I entered her, and soon we were both riding a wave of light that filled the room until it burst like a balloon and we were back on a grimy tile floor in Havana waiting for the boat to get us to a better place.

I lit a cigarette while she went to the bathroom down the hall, the overhead water tank of the toilet clanging like a fire bell when she yanked the chain. She came back into the kitchen, put the coffee in the boiling pot, and was soon serving me the inky sweet concoction Cubans call a
cafecito
. She sat at the table, knees together like a schoolgirl, unsure of my reaction. I said nothing and simply stared. I was waiting for her request and it didn’t take long in arriving. No free lunch in this world, my daddy always said.

Raquel looked toward the coach house where David was still passed out on the bed. “He sleeps a lot when he takes the drugs,” she said in Spanish. “He’s always trying to run away from himself.”

“Y tú?” I asked her. “What about you? What are you running away from?”

She gazed back at me, weighing her response, then took a cigarette out of my pack without asking. I would have slapped her hand but sometimes you have to be tolerant to get where you want to go. I even lit the cigarette for her.

“Me, I am running away from Camagüey. From my old man’s hut, the son of a bitch, from this fucking crazy country.”

“Is that why you’re with the kid?”

She cracked a hard smile. “A little American boy comes in looking for easy love and revolution? Sure. You understand. You know what they call us? Las putas del Chino.” She stopped to make sure I understood. The Chinaman’s whores. I nodded.

“I hate fucking Chinamen. They smell of rotten fish. But that’s what I had to do, until David came around.”

All of a sudden she dropped her cigarette, grabbed her stomach, put her hand to her mouth. “Ay Dios mío!” she said, rushing to the bathroom, barely making it in time to upchuck something green and brown and vile. I blew concentric rings of smoke watching her from the door as she flushed, rinsed her beautiful mouth, straightened out her fiimsy clothes. She saw my reflection in the mirror and she knew her game was up.

“What month?” I asked her.

She stared back, put on some ruby red lipstick. “Cuatro.”

“It hardly shows,” I said.

“It’s a good thing, otherwise I…” She turned to me, her doe eyes pleading with a mixture of fear and pride. “You’re not going to tell him, are you?”

I shook my head. “No. But I’m curious: What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

“I don’t know. But eventually, I guess I would have told him.”

“Do you love him?”

She shrugged, came up to me, kissed me lightly on the lips. “What is to love?”

I saw my own reflection in a mirror above the stove—my crooked nose, the scar on my forehead, the wide-set blue eyes that were the only thing my father left me.

“Sí,” I repeated, “what is to love?”

We didn’t say much after that. There wasn’t much to be said. We understood each other. She wanted out and so did I. The boy in his opium-induced dream in the bed was our ticket and we had to baby him. She did it her way, I did it mine.

Raquel returned to lie with David for a while as I waited for the sun to come up. I went out to the terrace and sat on an ornate iron bench, staring out at the sky, at the lights revolving madly above the fence and thick fortress of trees. The noise was far away now and dew was alighting, a low gray mist that seemed like a sponge wanting to wipe the whole town clean of the past, of the wrongs that had been done, of the hearts that had been broken. Or maybe it was just wiping it clean for the next round, I pondered, as I thought I heard a cry for help followed by a yelp of pain followed by the echo of a shot or two followed by silence.

The sky was a riot of mauve, purple, and red, the sun rising like an orange ball over Marina Barlovento when I walked down to the docks. The streets were eerily empty, but Siboney—in spite of its concentration of diplomats and foreigners—had woken up as fiercely revolutionary as before it had been cravenly Batistiano. The banners of Castro’s 26 of July Movement hung from windows, while above doors a few sycophants had already put up signs announcing,
Fidel, esta es tu casa
. Fidel, this house is yours.

The prospect of a five-hundred-dollar payout had been enough to rouse the old black capitán from his house in nearby Jaimanitas, enough to make him venture out, load the supplies, and chug-chug his creaking boat out to the pier.

“Viva Fidel!” I said as I stepped on the
Buena Vista
, a trawler that had last seen a varnish job when it was a rumrunner’s boat docking in the rushes of Cedar Key. It had absolutely nothing in common with the sleek yachts parked at Barlovento.

“Sssh! You want to get shot at?” said Anselmo in his low, slurring speech. “There’s a lot of Batistianos here desperate to get out. No se habla de la soga en casa del ahorcado.”
Don’t mention rope in the home of the hanged
. “Look, there goes Ventura’s boat!”

He pointed at a gleaming Chris-Craft churning its way through the gray waters, carrying on board the once feared head of Batista’s secret police.

“Sic transit,” I muttered.

“Qué?”

“May lightning strike him…You will be ready for us?”

“Sure, chico. Just make certain to return within the hour. Fidel’s people and the boys from the Directorio are already taking over City Hall. I’m sure they will be here soon and who knows how long before they let people out again. They are out for blood today, compadre.”

I turned the shower on in the coach house, dousing the still sleeping David. The water came out brown at first, but by the time it had cleared David was up and on his knees, gasping for air. I turned off the faucet, threw him a towel.

“Let’s go, sleeping beauty. Time’s a wasting.”

Looking like a wet retriever, David took a few bumbling steps out of the tub, then heaved into the toilet.

I stepped outside and waited until he came out and drank the coffee Raquel had brought in for him from the main house. He looked around, taking stock of the place, obviously not remembering how he had gotten there. He smiled at me, still silent, then nodded in greeting. I nodded back and was lighting a cigarette when he dove for the window. I managed to grab him by the waistband.

“What the fuck is wrong with you anyhow?” I said, heaving him back inside and slapping him around a couple of times. He sat on the floor, Raquel hugging him.

“I told you, I’m not going back to San Francisco,” he replied, rubbing his face where I’d landed my punch.

“Are you crazy? You want to stay here and do what? Do you know what just happened last night?”

“What?”

“Listen up, you idiot. Batista just left.”

I turned on the old shortwave radio by the window. The plummy voice of the BBC announcer cut through the moist air:
“Here is the news. The President of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, has fled the country, his government in ruins, in the face of a relentless advance by the rebel army led by a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, Fidel Castro. Thousands of Cubans took to the streets in celebration this morning as word spread of Batista’s departure for the Dominican Republic in the early hours of this day. There are reports of looting in Havana. Hundreds of slot machines from casinos have been dragged into the street and smashed. One casino has been looted. President Batista handed over power to a military junta before he left. They ordered a cease-fire and appealed to the rebel forces of Dr. Castro for cooperation. Dr. Castro, however, announced this morning on rebel radio that operations would continue. ‘The triumph of the Revolution must be complete,’ he said.”