White Shadow (55 page)

IT MAY not have been that night. It may have been the next night or the next month or the month after that. But it wasn’t long after Winchester became the city’s vice chief that Ed Dodge found himself out late and running from Janet, who’d fallen deeper into her depression. Their house was compulsively clean and dinner always in the refrigerator, with her always passed out from the booze and pills by the time he got home.

Dodge knew he was looking for Edy Parkhill.

He tried The Hub and the Sapphire Room.

But he found her at the Tampa Terrace. He smiled when he saw her, sitting at the end of the grand piano, as Fred Bender played some melancholy music from the war. Bender told a joke about once being a chaplain’s apprentice and the group around him laughed and as he launched into another song and as Dodge moved close, he saw Edy snuggle into the arm of John Parkhill. Parkhill’s face was flushed red with alcohol and he sang along to Bender’s piano as a martini sloshed around in his hand. His face looked jowly and filled with broken veins. His neck was thick and fat in his tight white collar, his tie loose.

Edy was tan and curvy in a light blue dress that hugged her hips and waist. Her mouth looked moist and wet against the edge of the highball glass. Her hair scooped back into combs.

Her dark eyes glassy as she laughed with some unheard joke.

Dodge ordered a Miller and a shot of Jack from the bartender and listened to Bender play a short list and some requests. Dodge wondered if Bender was doing this full-time since leaving the department.

(There had been some trouble with a prisoner, and most believed Bender had been made the scapegoat.)

The air was rich with tobacco that smelled of cedar and aged leaves, and Dodge just sat and listened to Bender play with his fat, strong fingers with Edy singing nearby. The ashtray on the piano was filled to the brim with crushed cigarettes.

The bartender made his way to the plate-glass window and pulled the cord on the OPEN sign, turning off the red neon, and the little group by Bender all booed him and made catcalls and Dodge was almost out the door when he looked back.

The room was halfway lit with the neon behind the bar and had a thick haze of smoke.

Edy looked at him, through the haze, seeming to be caught between glass.

She stumbled as she stepped and steadied her hands on the piano. She looked at Dodge and pointed.

She laughed.

He never was sure if Edy recognized him.

IT WAS NIGHT, and the rain fell in buckets from the Gulf as Scarface Johnny wandered around the Boston Bar, the power momentarily knocked out, and placed candles on tabletops and along the bar. He tucked buckets under the dripping ceiling that was falling off in wet sheets and crashing to the ground in broken piles. He smoked a few cigarettes and stayed close to the register with a gun for a few minutes, but soon power was restored and the jukebox flickered on and the Boston Bar was filled with light and the sounds of Gene Autry. A few dockworkers swigging draft beer groaned, looking at Rivera like it had been his fault, and he gave them a “fuck you” stare before he saw Baby Joe come in the bar and take off his cowboy hat.

Baby Joe asked for a whiskey and a draft chaser and placed his elbows on the bar before lighting up a smoke.

“Fights are on,” Baby Joe said.

Rivera jerked the jukebox’s plug out of the wall, noticed the sticker for DIXIE AMUSEMENTS, and peeled it off with his thumbnail.

He turned on the radio and on came the fights from the City Auditorium, and he placed another whiskey in front of Joe, who took a swig, looking like a midget Cuban cowboy in his checked shirt and dark jeans.

Baby Joe stayed there until one of the fighters went down in the fifth and he tried to pay his tab, but Johnny shook his head as he emptied out the buckets by the front door.

Soon, they were alone in the bar, besides a new barmaid who Johnny planned on taking home with him tonight. She was emptying out the cigar and cigarette ashes and playing some more cowboy music and being amazed at Joe’s real two-toned boots.

“You know Santo’s shitting money down in Havana,” Baby Joe said.

“That a fact,” Johnny said, still cleaning.

“Make a fella think about going down there.”

“Fuck Santo.”

“What you got against him?”

“Plenty.”

“Hey, Johnny?”

Johnny turned around, an empty bucket and a plunger in his hand.

“Yeah.”

“You ever think about the Old Man?”

Johnny shrugged.

“I don’t mean him like the person, you know. I mean do you ever think about the days? The El Dorado and Tito and the Shotgun Wars.”

Scarface Johnny smiled. He put down the buckets and lit a smoke.

Thunder growled out in the bay. The rain started back, pinging on top of the Boston Bar. The barmaid gave him the easy eye.

“Sure,” Johnny said. “Sometimes.”

And Johnny knew that Baby Joe was watching him open up the little bathroom and work out shit clogging the toilet. He kept the cigarette in his mouth, like it was just a routine thing, and he didn’t even turn around as he flushed and the water spilled out of the bowl and onto his good shoes and into the bar where he’d stay for a good part of his life.

Johnny got onto his hands and knees cleaning up the mess with towels.

Baby Joe tried not to look at him down there, instead keeping his eyes on the green neon octagon clock. “Did they ever find that girl that worked for you? That Cuban piece who shot those men at Angel Oliva’s?”

THE BANK was one of those buildings in South Beach molded in the old Art Deco style, a bright yellow stucco with gentle curves and aerodynamic trim. There were portholes and rounded doors and glass brick. The old bank was a relic that looked like a grounded ship.

It rained the morning a woman in a plastic kerchief and white-and-red dress waited for the teller to open the bank’s doors. She quickly presented a withdrawal slip and was politely told to wait for the vice president, who would be in shortly. She was given some dull American coffee and a doughnut, and an hour later a blond man with a dark suntan arrived at his big, fat desk and shook her rough little hand.

The teller whispered in the man’s ear and his face dropped. He closed the door.

The woman asked if there was a problem.

He asked to see her credentials and she showed him a Florida driver’s license and a Social Security card. The name matched.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Would you perhaps reconsider?”

She told him a punctual story—in her very limited English—about needing the money for an important investment, and the man smiled and said not to worry. It was only when she opened her old army duffel bag and asked for the money in cash that he seemed to bristle.

More coffee was poured.

More talk. He offered her investment possibilities.

“May I at least ask what type of investment would call for so much cash?”

The woman smiled, careful to keep her knees closed in the dress, the odd feeling of makeup on her face. “Of course,” she said.

He waited.

“A boat.”

He smiled at her. “Some boat.”

“She is a yacht,” she said. “Quite beautiful.”

The beautiful, brown girl lit a cigar, which seemed to strike the bank president completely odd, and she smoked it like a man as it took four tellers to fill her bag and two mammoth steamer trunks she had a friend bring from her car.

Her friend was a handsome man, with handsome features and dark, long hair. She did not introduce him, but the bank manager noticed when they left that she called him Che.

Lucrezia smiled as they left, a fat cigar clenched in her teeth.

The bank manager and the tellers watched as the two piled back into a big black Buick, the steamer trunks fitted in the trunk and the backseat, and pulled away on a dark Miami day with endless rain.

The
Times
sent me to Havana when Batista fled on a private plane and Fidel began his triumphant trip west. By now, the world knew of the ambitious lawyer from the Oriente province—like America’s Texas—that had built his dozen followers into an army of ten thousand. They picked up more as they drove west, piling in confiscated Jeeps, cars, tanks, and buses. They drove for days, Fidel getting no sleep, as they shook hands and earned kisses from shoeless women. I saw Castro as he drove in the slow train, perched on a Jeep with his splotchy black beard and green kepi. He wore green fatigues, as did the other armed men as they paraded down the Malecón. The crowds wore red-and-black arm-bands with JULY 26TH written on them. Beautiful girls scrawled 26 on their foreheads, as if it were Lent.

On the second day after my arrival, after sleeping the night in the lobby of the Ambos Mundos, I found a driver to take me and a
Time
magazine correspondent out to the Campo de Tiro firing range, where the executions had started. I watched children screaming to the bearded men in army fatigues to “Kill them.” I watched as a bulldozer dug a forty-foot-long and ten-foot-wide trench. I watched as some of the prisoners wept or stood silent. I watched a priest lead the prisoners—who we were told were Batista’s secret police—through the thick, tropical night and in front of the glare of Jeep headlights.

One night, I saw a woman pulled from her apartment in Habana Vieja by two teens with scraggly beards and fatigues. She said she’d only pointed to the boys when asked their names by police. The teens laughed at the old woman, and one made a gesture of slitting a throat and said:
“Chivata!”

The bleating goat.