A Quiet Vendetta

ELEVEN

¡Lo Cubana – está aquí! – The real Cuba – it’s here!

Havana.

Stalinism and palm trees.

The crumbling façade of Spanish colonialism.

Barrio di Colón, the tattered remnants of the red light district from Batista’s dictatorship.

San Isidro, once beautiful, stately, awe-inspiring, now ramshackle and desperate, hunkering around Havana’s railway district like a dirty and discarded coat.

Later, much later, there was a boy who would become as close to me as a brother, and we would remember this time.

‘You remember January of ’59?’ he would say. ‘When there was a strike of all the working people, and Havana came to a standstill. Batista was president then, and his secret police were fighting with the rebels in the streets. It was then that Castro’s guerrillas came from the mountains, and they ran through the streets and took this city. There was no-one left to fight them, no-one at all. You remember that time, Ernesto?’

The boy would smile, and in that smile was a memory of something that would forever remain a part of our lives.

‘When Castro made Manuel Urrutia the president after Batista fled, and he swore in the new government at Oriente University in Santiago de Cuba, yes? They made Castro Delegate of the President for the Armed Forces and Jose Rubido as Chief of the Army. And Castro? He drove like a conquering Caesar along the length of the island towards Havana! We celebrated everywhere he went, and that evening we heard that those who’d stood against Castro in Las Villas Province, Colonel Lumpay and Major Mirabel, had been executed.’

The boy had smiled again. ‘I saw them executed, Ernesto… I saw them plead for their lives, but Castro was like a king returned to his homeland and he allowed no mercy. He put Che Guevara in charge of Havana itself, and we went through the streets, thousands of us, and we burned flags and we set buildings on fire, and there were men drinking wine and singing and fucking women in the street. Down Calzada de Zapata we went, our voices raised, and out along Avenida Salvador Allende and through Coppelia Park to the Cristobal Colón Cemetery…’

I laughed with him. I remembered these things. I had been there too. Ernesto Cabrera Perez. We were amongst them, me and my ghost of a father, caught in the whirlwind of revolution and passion and gunfire.

My father was all of forty-six years old, but he carried himself as if he were sixty or seventy. The Havana Hurricane had come home, back to a place whose name he had used with self-aggrandized pride, but in the face of everything, the age and history and significance of this place, he was nothing more than what he truly was: a fighter, a whiskey-fueled brawler, a bare-knuckle madman possessing neither sufficient sense nor sanity to work a trade alongside his Friday night thunderings. And yet he was even less than that – weaker and more broken and less substantial than I had ever believed, and he carried inside of him a guilt so burdensome and weighty that the strength remaining in his bones and frame could not have borne it for long. He had killed his own wife. In a fit of insatiable sexual fury he had broken his own wife’s neck as he forced her against the wall. That was what he was, and that was all he was, and that was all he ever would be: a stupid old man, old before his time, who in some moment of drunken madness had killed the only person who’d ever really loved him. Loved him not for what he was, but loved him for what she believed he might become. In the end she was wrong, for he became nothing, and I walked with that nothing, the shell of a man that was my father, through the streets of Old Havana, down along Calle Obispo to the Plaza de Armas, and as he walked he whispered in his hoarse and fatigued voice, No es fácil… no es fácil… It’s not easy… it’s not easy.

‘I know, Father, I know,’ I would reply, and though my words bore the face of sympathetic understanding, they carried behind their backs the grim steel of vengeance.

The Sicilians – years, so many years later – would tell me of vengeance. ‘Quando fai i piani per la vendetta, scava due tombe – una per la tua vittima e una per te stesso,’ they would say. You head out for vengeance, you dig two graves… one for your victim and one for yourself. And then they would smile with their mouth but not with their eyes, and in that expression you could see a thousand years of understanding about the darker elements of man and the shadows that he carried.

But during those first few weeks, as we found our feet, as I discovered the land of my father, as Cuba gave birth to something inside of me that made me believe that wherever I might have been born, wherever I might have been raised, this place – this impassioned, heated, sweating, writhing confusion of humanity and inhumanity, sprawling out from west to east, a punctuation mark between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Straits, the Windward Passage – was so much more than I had ever believed or imagined.

Such romance, such fiction! Names such as Sancti Spiritus, Santiago de Cuba, a stone’s throw from Haiti and Jamaica, from Puerto Rico and the Bahamas; St James the Apostle Carnival, the African-Catholic faith of Santeria, and rumba and salsa and cha-cha-cha, and lazy island days out of Cayo Largo, and here is where Hemingway would live at Papa’s Place, Finca la Vigia, and after his death his family would give his home to the people of Cuba for carrying the dreams of their son for the better part of twenty years.

And it would only be later, much later, years behind me once I had returned to the United States, that I would look back and believe that Cuba had always been in my heart and soul, that had I stayed there all the terrible things to come would perhaps never have happened. But by then it was too late, and by then I would be looking at my life with the mind and eyes of an older man, not the man I was then, the young man walking my father through those self-same streets, believing that here I had found nothing more than a sanctuary from the justice that my father would inevitably meet…

Though not the way I then believed.

And not from my own hand.

For now my hand did nothing more than lead the way for him, show him where he would lie down in the dark one-room hovel we rented for a single American dollar a week – the same hand that gripped the sill of the window as I looked out towards the lights of Florida while my mind believed that if I could only make it back there alone, if I could only find my way, there would be something waiting for me that would give everything else some sense.

But then it did not, and would not for a great many years to come. The New Year of 1959 I was nothing more than my father’s keeper, and as he lay on his mattress, as he mumbled unintelligible words interspersed with the sound of my mother’s name, as his mind slowly dissolved into the final darkness of guilt for who he was and what he had done, I knew I had to escape from this life any way I could.

My eyes were open, my heart was willing, and I had already long-since realized that the pathway to freedom was bought with dollars. Hard-earned or not, there was only one way out, and that way carried a price.

I’ll tell you something now: in the 1950s it was different. Seemed to me a man was a man and a girl was a girl. None of this free love, men holding hands with men in public kind of thing. Guy wanted to take it up the ass then he did it in the privacy of his own home, or maybe he rented a hotel room by the hour. At the time I figured people like that were crazy, not the Jesus told me to stay home and clean my guns crazy, but just a little short on whatever it took to make a hundred cents spend like a dollar. Maybe I don’t seem to be the truthful kind of person, but I’ll let you in on one other thing: I say something, well you can take it to the bank, and I’ll tell you what happened in 1959 with the old guys and the rent boys and the promise of a dollar.

The room I rented for me and my father was on the outskirts of Old Havana, La Habana Vieja, and back behind the Plaza de la Catedral there was a street called Empedrado. The house we inhabited was shared by the better part of six or seven families, some with kids no taller than my knee, and some with babies who would cry at night when the heat was fierce, or who would cry from hunger or from thirst, or from the croup when it came and infected them, all of them at once.

Met a boy there; seventeen he was, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but he smoked cigarettes like he’d been doing it for a thousand years. His family name was Cienfuegos, his given name Ruben, and Ruben Cienfuegos became as close to me as any other human being. It was with him that I spoke of the revolution, of Castro overthrowing Batista and taking Cuba back for the people. It was he who taught me how to smoke the cigarettes, he who showed me pictures of girls with wide mouths and wider legs that made me so horny I could’ve fucked a cracked plate given a little lubrication, and when he told me of his cousin, a sixteen-year-old called Sabina, when he told me she would do me for two American dollars, I went like a lamb to the slaughter. A narrow mattress in the corner of a darkened room, and Sabina – whose hair was longer than any girl’s I’d ever seen, whose eyes were wide and bright and eager, and yet somehow wary like a feral thing; a girl who pulled down my pants and massaged my cock until it was stiff and aching, who took me by the hand and laid me down, and then lifted her skirt and sat astride me, who then lowered herself onto me until I felt I would disappear completely between those muscled brown thighs, and who rolled over me like a wave of something terrible and magical and profound, and who later would take my two American dollars and tuck them into the waistband of her panties, and lean forward and kiss my face, and tell me that she could feel my warmth inside her, and then had laughed and told me that what had just happened was as necessary and vital as being christened by the Pope himself in the Vatican, and told me then that if I had left it any longer I might very well have drowned her. And then she showed me to the door and down the stairs to where Ruben stood smoking and smiling and satisfied… When Ruben Cienfuegos told me of these things, and then made his promise that it would happen, and then brought me to the place where it did happen, well Ruben became perhaps the most important person in my life.

And she, she whose name I would never forget, and yet met only once, became something that existed only in my mind and my heart. In years to come I would think of her, Sabina, and make-believe that she was somewhere thinking also of me. In some way that moment with her was as meaningful as the moment I stood over the dead body of Carryl Chevron such a long time before. A defining moment. A moment that would stand as a testimony of my life, evidence that I had in fact walked the earth, that, at least once, perhaps twice, I had truly been someone.

I thought of her often, but never spoke her name, because to speak of her would have been to break the spell and let the world know something of who I was. Who I was belonged to no-one but me, and that was the way I wished it.

It was Ruben who told me of the Italians. He told me of the Hotel Nacional and how a black man called Nat King Cole – who was not a real king and did not possess a kingdom – had sung there for the Italians and yet could not stay in the hotel that night because he was negroid, and how the Italians had come here to Cuba when they had been forced out of Florida by the authorities, forced out because they had killed so many people and taken so much money, and how the law could do nothing to stop them. Cuba was their salvation, Cuba was their home from home, and in ten-thousand-dollar apartments they would drink Folger’s Coffee and smoke Cohibas and Montecristos and Bolivars and Partagases.

‘Up there,’ he told me, ‘near where they live, you will find the little birds.’

‘The little birds?’

Ruben smiled. ‘Yes, Ernesto, the little birds… the faggots, the queers, the homos, the young men who will take it up the ass for a dollar and a pack o’ smokes.’

I closed my eyes. I thought of that night as I waited for the tide to turn, as I buried my fingernails into the palms of my hands and paid the ferryman his price of passage. I knew what Ruben Cienfuegos was talking about, and with that knowledge came a sense of hatred and loathing for whosoever would support such a terrible trade.

‘The rich guys go down there, the ones with all the dollars, some of them Italians, some of them Cuban businessmen who have a taste for such things.’ Ruben smiled and winked and lit another cigarette. ‘And I have an idea, my little Ernesto,’ he said, even though I was older than him by a year or two, and then he smiled and winked again and told me of his plan.

Three nights later, dressed in a clean white shirt Ruben had borrowed from his cousin on his mother’s side, Araujo Limonta, with pressed pants made of thick cotton, with canvas shoes similar to those worn by the boatmen who haunted the bars along Avenida Carlos M. Céspedes, I stood with my heart in my mouth and an American cigarette in my hand near the corner of Jesús Pergerino Street. I stood there patiently as the cars drove by, some of them slowing down as they cruised along the curb, and I waited for as long as I believed it possible to wait. Later Ruben told me it was no more than ten minutes before a car pulled to a stop ahead of me, as the window came down, as a greasy-haired man with a gold tooth like Carryl Chevron the salesman leaned out towards me and asked me how much.

‘Two dollars,’ I told him, for this is what Ruben Cienfuegos had directed me to say, and the man with the gold tooth and the greasy hair had smiled and nodded and reached his hand through the window and waved me over. I climbed into the car just as Ruben had said, my heart thundering enough to burst right there in my chest, my teeth gritted, sweat breaking free of my hairline and itching my skin. I sat silently as the man drove a half block further and slowed to a dead stop in a dark pool between the streetlights. Ruben said he would be waiting. Ruben said he knew where the men would take me, and as he told me these things he told me that I was to act naturally, to act as if I had done such things a thousand times before, for he would be there – my savior, my benefactor – and he would ensure no harm came to me.

The greasy-haired man placed his left hand on my knee.

I flinched, I could not help it.

The hand with its fat fingers, with its single gold ring with a blue stone set within, traced a line from my knee towards my crotch. I could feel the pressure against my leg, could feel the weight of sin that was intended, and I closed my eyes as that same hand reached between my legs and started rubbing me, just as Sabina had done, but this time different, this time with a motion that made me sick inside.

What Ruben hit the man with I do not know. But he hit him hard. I didn’t even see him coming, but through the open window on the other side of the car a dark shape came rocketing in towards us, and collided with the back of the man’s head.

His anticipatory leer became a wide-mouthed expression of shock – but just for a second, nothing more than a heartbeat – for he swayed backwards suddenly, and then his head rolled sideways on his shoulders and he fell against the dash.

I came out of the passenger door as if I had been ejected with great force. I fell to the road, fell to my hands and knees, and though I wanted to puke I could manage nothing more than a dry choking cough. My instinct told me to drag the greasy-haired gold-toothed man out of the car and kick him, to kick him hard and fast, to kick him in the head until he would never wake up, but Ruben was then beside me, lifting me from the road, standing there to support me, to start me laughing as he pointed at the unconscious form of the man in his tailored suit, in his expensive car, the sickening pervert smile wiped from his face with one swift blow to the head.

‘Quick!’ Ruben said, and together we entered the car.

We took the man’s ring, his pocketbook, his watch, even his shoes. We took his leather belt, his keys, his cigarettes and a half bottle of whiskey we found beneath the driver’s seat. We ran from the side of the car laughing like schoolgirls, and we kept on running – down San Miguel and across Gonzalez, across Padre Valera and Campanario – and we kept on running until I felt my lungs would implode with the pressure.

Later that night, as we smoked the man’s American cigarettes, as we drank his whiskey, as we counted once more the sixty-seven American dollars we had found tucked into the back of his pocketbook, I realized that everything I could ever wish for could be taken with violence.

Back so many years before – in deciding to kill a man for the knowledge he had brought, deciding to do something that would make my mother proud of me, but in some way had made me a reflection of my father – I had taken my first step down a lonely road. There were those, people such as Ruben, who would walk with me for some time, but even Ruben Cienfuegos, with his wide smile and riotous laughter, with his whiskey-fueled bravado that night in La Habana Vieja, was not among those willing to take the necessary extra step. I could have killed the man, could have dragged him from his car and beaten him just as my father had beaten so many men before. But my father had only ever killed a man out of passion, out of the fury born of his sport, whereas I had killed a man for something I believed I could own. I believed then that such things were in my blood, and it would only be another two weeks before the blood rose once more, before I realized that what I was doing was not simply a matter of ability, but more a matter of necessity. I could kill, and so I did, and the more such killing I carried out the more necessary it became. It was like a virus that gripped me, but it came from the mind and the heart and the soul, not from the cells or the nerves or the brain. It was there within me, perhaps had always been, and it was merely an issue of eventual provocation, the force majeure, and Cuba – its lights, its heat, its promise, its emotion – seemed to fuel that provocation without effort.

I became a man in Havana. I became my own hurricane. Seemed to me that every life I extinguished was in some way a repayment to God for how He had mistreated me. I was not so naïve as to consider myself piteous or worthy of special vindication, but I was not so ignorant as to believe that what I possessed was anything but valuable. There were men who would pay for what I could do. Rare is the soul who will take another’s life, and then walk home, his hands steady, his heart quiet in his chest, taking only sufficient time to consider how well he had executed the act, how professional he had been. It became the semblance of a vocation, a calling, and I followed the calling with a degree of natural response that served to excite me.

Ernesto Cabrera Perez was a killer by nature and by choosing.

I made my choice. I wore it well. It suited me, and I suited it.

I consummated my craft in the first week of February of 1960.

The intervening year was one of real life. During those months, as Cuba stretched through her growing pains, as Havana reestablished itself beneath the new regime, Ruben Cienfuegos and I lived life like there was no tomorrow. We stole and cheated and conned our way through many hundreds of American dollars, much of it finding its way between the legs of hookers, down the necks of bottles, and out at the bloody mid-afternoon cockfights and nightly jai-alai contests. We believed we were men; we believed that this was how real men behaved, and we felt little responsibility for our actions and significantly less scruples.

Castro was the Premier of Cuba, el Comandante en Jefe, and with his own breed of communistic vision he had ousted the Batista-owned and run casinos. He was not blind to the ravages of hedonism that had raddled his homeland, and even on the eve of his assumption of power the peoples of that same homeland had stormed the multi-million-dollar hotels that had once served the tourist trade and lined the pockets of Batista’s family and the organized crime cohorts. In downtown Havana the crowds were frenzied and enraged. They stormed in their hundreds to the doors of the casinos and hotels, and broke their way into the empty air-conditioned, plush-carpeted foyers to wreak havoc. Inside they found roulette, dice and card tables, bars and slot machines, ten thousand of which had been controlled by Batista’s brother-in-law. Batista’s Mafia-financed palaces were destroyed. The military and the police stayed in their barracks, senior officers knowing all too well that their own troops would merely join the mobs, and no-one stepped forward to prevent the people from tearing the hotels and gambling joints apart.

Castro abolished gambling as one of his first decrees as the new dictator. Even as the decree was passed, even as the boats bringing tourists from Florida and the Keys sat idle and empty against the jetties and docks, Castro knew he could not win. That money, the same money that had been creamed as graft from these dens of iniquity, was the finance that had kept Cuba alive. Castro also knew that the Syndicate possessed the only people who could make the casinos and hotels run at a profit, and thus he retracted his decree and gambling was legalized once more. Now state-run and overseen, where Batista had charged $250,000 for each license, and more again beneath the table, Castro’s regime levied a fee of $25,000 plus twenty percent of the profits from each casino. He made it illegal for anyone other than naturalized Cubans to act as croupiers, and the Americans came in as ‘official teachers’. Castro hired advertising agencies to promote the high-life of Havana; the hotels were rebuilt and refurbished after the ravages of his people on the eve of his assumption; the tourists came back in their thousands, and with them a reputed annual revenue exceeding fifty million dollars.

A little more than twenty years earlier a different sequence of events had begun that would bring to Havana one of the most influential organized crime figures in history. In January 1936 a government special prosecutor named Thomas E. Dewey began a series of raids on New York’s brothels. The raids continued until March when a ninety-count indictment was brought against Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Luciano fled New York to a gambling club in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and this was where he was arrested. He was extradited to New York City, and on 13 May 1936 his trial began. On 7 June of the same year a jury found Luciano guilty of sixty-two counts of prostitution, and he was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in Dannemora Prison in upstate New York. On 7 May 1945, a petition for executive clemency and freedom was made to the now governor, Thomas Dewey, and Dewey agreed to a reduction of sentence. On 3 January 1946, Dewey announced that Luciano would be freed, but he was to be deported to his native Sicily. Luciano was released from Great Meadow and taken to Ellis Island. Here he boarded the vessel Laura Keene, which set sail on its two-week voyage to Genoa. Between February and October Luciano moved from his hometown of Lercara Friddi to Palermo, thence to Naples and on to Rome. Here he obtained two passports, and aboard a freighter he made his way to Caracas in Venezuela. He flew from Caracas to Mexico City, where he chartered a private aircraft for his flight to Havana, Cuba. He was ninety miles from the coast of Florida, a stopover on his planned return to the United States.

In Havana Luciano was met by his childhood friend and ally Meyer Lansky, and taken to the Hotel Nacional. It was in that same hotel that Luciano and Lansky arranged what would later be known as the Havana Conference for the third week of December 1946. Luciano moved into a plush and extravagant home in the Miramar suburb. Lansky traveled back and forth between Miami and Havana, keeping Luciano informed of the arrangements for the Conference.

On Christmas Eve the Conference took a break. Wives and girlfriends arrived and a party in honor of Frank Sinatra – an up-and-coming star who had arrived with the Fischetti brothers – was held.

The Havana casinos flourished, even under Castro’s regime, and Meyer Lansky, the man Batista had employed to make Cuba the place for America to gamble away its hard-earned millions, now made those millions for Castro. He had cleaned up the Sans Souci and Montmartre clubs, had leaned on major operators like Norman Rothman and forced them to straighten up their acts, had had many of the crooked American casino managers deported, and instigated the practice of dealing blackjack from a six-deck shoe, a practice which stacked the odds heavily in favor of the casinos and prevented cheating by both players and dealers.

The Italians carried gambling in their blood and bones, they were the most proven and successful impresarios in the business, and their willingness to pay government officials for the right to operate their business was legend. Lansky brought with him the cream of the crop from Vegas, Reno and New York. At his right hand was his own brother, Jake, installed as the floor manager in the Nacional’s casino. From Florida came Santo Trafficante who was given an interest in the Sans Souci, the Comodoro and the Capri. Joseph Silesi and the actor George Raft bought pieces of the business, along with Fat the Butch from New York’s Westchester County and Thomas Jefferson McGinty from Cleveland. There was no opposition, and thus there was no need for the heavy-handed tactics employed on the mainland. The tourists had no worry about loaded dice, stacked decks or magnetic clips beneath the roulette wheels. The business was as clean as it could get, and with decades of experience behind them the Syndicate established Cuba as the place to be. Pit bosses, dealers and stickmen were ferried in from the States, and they trained the Cuban croupiers and house-staffs in the ways of the world. Castro’s denunciation of gambling had at one time sent the tourists out to the La Concha Hotel in San Juan or the Arawak Hotel in Jamaica, but his reversal had brought them home once more, and it was into this world that Ruben and I stepped unknowingly in the beginning of 1960.

The scam still ran, the ‘little bird’ scam for the queer businessmen and switch-hitter Cubans, and while Fidel Castro Ruz curried favor with the USSR, while he instigated agreements to buy Russian oil, while he generated friction with the US by taking American-owned properties and giving insufficient compensation, Ruben and I were busy making our mark and loading our own dice.

It was a Friday night, 5 February, and it was Ruben’s idea that we head up to the car lot back of the Nacional and check out the trade. It was new territory, but Ruben had heard that the tricks up there were prepared to pay upwards of twenty dollars a time to get their balls emptied by some young Cuban stud. If they carried that much for a blowjob, Ruben said, then what kind of bankroll had they pocketed when they went out for the night?

I was twenty-two years old, I looked no more than eighteen or nineteen, and when I walked from the car to the edge of the lot, when I stood leaning against the railing that separated the lot from the walkway, dressed in white linen pants, an oversized ivory-colored shirt and canvas boat shoes, when I lit my cigarette and flicked the hair from my eyes, I could tell that there weren’t many of those old boys that could have resisted me. It was an act, a performance, a face I wore for the world, and I wore it well. Like a professional.

The car that drew alongside me was a deep burgundy Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, a hardtop, and the way the silk paintwork shined, the way the chrome runners and wheel-hubs reflected a million lights from the Nacional behind me, I knew I was right up there with the players.

The driver was no Cuban. His manner, his voice, his clothes – everything about him told me he was Italian. He smiled wide. He winked. He told me ‘Hi there’, asked if I was waiting for someone in particular, if he could give me a ride somewhere.

‘Kind of ride would you be speaking about?’ I asked him.

‘Any kind of ride you might be interested in,’ he said.

‘Kind that pays maybe twenty dollars?’ I asked.

‘Maybe,’ the man said, and again he smiled, and then he winked, and I walked around back of the car and slid in through the passenger side door.

‘I got a little place,’ the man said, and then he placed his hand on my knee.

I pressed myself against the seat, and there in the rear waistband of my pants I could feel the handle of my shiv. I smiled to myself. He was not a big man. He dressed too well to be a heavy hitter for the mob. Dressed well enough to carry a handsome bankroll for his night out on the town.

‘Where we going?’ I asked.

‘See when we get there,’ he said, and I watched as his hands tightened on the steering wheel. He had on a wedding band, a plain gold hoop, and I wondered where his wife was, what his children were doing right that second, and I asked myself how these sick-minded motherfuckers ever believed there wouldn’t be some night when they would be nailed for what they were doing.

We drove for no more than five or six minutes, and then we turned left down a driveway ahead of a roadside motel. I could feel the tension in every sinew, every nerve, could feel the muscles tensing in the backs of my legs and my shoulders. I was frightened, I cannot deny it, but I was also excited. How many times we had pulled this scam I could not recall, and experience had proved that I could do this thing alone. Ruben was somewhere back near the Nacional; he would wait for me there, wait for me to return with as many dollars as I could take from this trick, and then we would party. On my side was fear. It was that simple. These guys were frightened of discovery, frightened that something would be said, frightened that they would be found out for what they were, and it was that fear that caused them not only to give in when faced with a youth with a knife, but also to say nothing of what had happened. Where would they go? Who would they report this to? The police? Their Mafia contacts? Somehow I didn’t think so.

The man drew the car to a halt back of a motel cabin. He killed the engine, took the keys and tucked them inside his jacket pocket, and before he exited he offered me a cigarette from a gold cigarette case. I took one and the man lit it for me, one for himself also. I followed him as he walked from the car to the front door of the cabin. With the same key chain he unlocked the door, stepped aside to let me enter, and then followed me in. It was a plainly-decorated room, the lights dimmed, ahead of me a double bed, a dresser with an oval mirror on top of it, and to the right a deep armchair facing a small table with a TV on top.

The man removed his jacket. ‘What shall I call you?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘Anything you like,’ I replied.

‘Francisco,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I shall call you Francisco.’

I nodded, but inside I was smiling. I thought of the next five minutes, perhaps the five minutes after that, and how much money I would run from this motel cabin with and the night that would follow.

‘And what shall I call you?’ I asked.

The man smiled. ‘You can call me “Daddy”,’ he said quietly.

In that second I felt sick to my stomach. I could only begin to imagine what kind of crazy fuck would request such a thing. I wanted to stab him through the heart right there and then. I wanted to make him kneel on the floor and beg for his life before I drove my shiv through his eye. I wanted to make him pay for all the many times he must have done this before.

And then I thought of my own father, the expression on his face as he staggered through the door after a night of fighting, the deadlight eyes, black and emotionless, with which he looked at my mother. They were all the same, these people. Give them a name, give them a nationality – it didn’t matter. These animals were all the same.

The man kicked off his shoes and then, unbuttoning the top of his pants, he let them drop to the floor. He stood there in his socks and shorts, and then he loosened his tie and took off his shirt.

I looked at his face. He had that same hollow emptiness of expression. The expression that would so frighten my mother.

I could see the man’s erection straining its way out of the middle of his body, and when he eased down his shorts and let them drop to his ankles, when he started to massage his own cock until it stood upright, when he looked across at me and smiled and opened his mouth, and said ‘Come to Daddy, Francisco… come and take care of your daddy…’ it was all I could do to take a step towards him.

Revulsion filled my chest, revulsion and anger and hatred for him and his kind. I eased my right hand around to the back of my pants, I felt the handle of the shiv between my fingers, and even as I reached him, even as he raised his hand and placed it on my shoulder, as I felt the pressure he applied to bring me down to my knees so he could force his cock into my mouth, I remembered that night on the beach in Florida, the price I had paid for my passage to Havana.

I was quick, quicker than his eye could follow, and with my right hand clenched tight I brought the shiv around like a tornado and drove it forward into his balls.

His eyes wide, sudden, unexpected, his body instinctively arched, a rapid and shocking rigidity that crushed him back against the dresser, and then down onto the floor as he tried to force himself away. I felt the man’s hand grip my waist, my shoulders, the tops of my legs, felt them relax as I pulled out the blade and once more brought it home into the side of his neck. He opened his mouth to scream, and his mouth was filled with the taste of blood, his nostrils with the smell of sweat. And then he could not breathe as his throat filled up, could not think, and the ceaseless grinding motion of the steel in his neck brought bright splashes of gray and scarlet into his eyes. He struggled, kicked his legs, his elbows flapping, but I had a hold on his throat, and I tightened that hold until he knew he would suffocate.

Images against his face, right up against him as if forcing their way inside. His breathing halted, he tried to say something, choked, eyes filled with water, with pain, with colors, his ears screaming with sounds, with pressure, the unrelenting violence of each fractured maniac second. He could not move, and then I sensed the moment he realized that his body was giving up, and in that moment of nervous relaxation I pushed him back onto the floor.

I punctured his throat once more with one swift and silent sweep of the knife. He felt the last moist warmth of his life enter the back of his throat, the top of his chest, felt his heart choking up whatever laid inside him and give it up to the world, this place, this dark and hollow cabin room, the strange crazy eyes that pressed against him from all sides.

His body shuddered violently, it shook in rapid consecutive motions, his throat pumping jagged red slashes across his chest, across the carpet, his stomach, the front of the dresser. I looked down as he rock-and-rolled through spasm after spasm of reluctant death, as he shivered and clawed and arched his back away from the blood-soaked matting.

I closed my hands over my ears, I bit my bottom lip until I too could taste blood, and then he collapsed.

Still and silent.

Like someone had deflated him.

His hand swung wide and banged against my knee. It rested there, its weight against my own sweated leg, and for some moments I just stared at it, at the blood-covered fingers, at the way they curled up accusingly, pointing towards me, the tension of the skin, the manicured nails, the sheen of polish, the lines in his palm – heartlines, lovelines, lifelines…

I moved my leg and the hand hit the carpet soundlessly.

Somewhere a dog barked, and then the sweep of brights as a car passed in the street, seeing everything for a split second and then disappearing into the night.

There was silence but for my own labored breathing, the sound of something building in my chest, the sound of some huge emotional release as I surveyed what I had done.

Condensation ran its fingerprints down the inside of the windows. I could smell cigar smoke, old and bitter, the tang of cheap alcohol, of diesel wine brewed in oil cans and gasoline drums, the ethyl haunt of late nights, gagging, retching into nowhere, into blind-eyed foolish wisdom, thinking that life begins at the base of a bottle or between a hooker’s thighs. I would be reminded of that smell the better part of four decades later, a warm night in Chalmette district, heart of New Orleans.

I was somewhere aloft, somewhere outside of myself looking down. Up there was Aix-La-Chapelle to Canteloupe, Cantata to Equation of Time, Equator to Heraclitus, Heraldry to Kansas, Kant to Marciano, Marconi to Ordovician Period, Oregon to Rameau, Rameses to UFO, Unified Theories to Zurich. Up there was wisdom, the very heart of hearts. Who was I really? The child of a lesser God? I thought not. More so a God from some lesser child.

I leaned back on my haunches and breathed deeply. I closed my eyes and centered myself. What I had done was right there in front of me. What I had done was indelibly painted across the carpet, across the dresser, across the back wall of the cabin. I thought of all those who had been here before me and I asked myself if justice had not been seen to be done.

I smiled.

An eye for an eye.

I had done this. I had made this happen. Was I not now someone? Surely I was; surely I was something that so many others were incapable of being. I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, a man capable of killing other men, a gifted man, a dangerous man. I was someone special.

I breathed deeply. For a moment I felt dizzy, a little sick. I raised my hands and looked at the blood that was drying on my skin. I could feel the tension it created, and when I clenched my fists I believed I could hear the blood cracking and splitting in the pores and wrinkles of my fingers. I turned them over. These were the hands that had lifted my mother when she could not walk by herself. These were the hands that had defended me against the railing fists of my father.

I was scared. I asked myself what was inside me that made it possible for me to do these things.

I looked into nothing – an abyss, a hollow – and when I closed my eyes I felt the dizziness and disorientation grow even worse. I opened my eyes and shuddered. Whatever was there I did not want to know.

I stood up, stripped off my clothes, and hurried through into the small adjoining bathroom to wash the blood from my hands.

I dressed in the man’s shirt and suit, put on his shoes, bundled my own clothes together and tied them in a ball. In the inside pocket of his jacket I found the car keys. In the other pocket I found a bankroll close on a thousand American dollars. I looked down once more, and as to serve no purpose other than adding insult to injury, I raised my right foot and stamped down hard on the man’s face.

I turned and walked to the cabin door. I glanced back one more time.

‘Sleep tight, Daddy,’ I whispered, and stepped out into the night.

I climbed into the car, started the engine, and drove out into the town, a town known only by those who lived there, a town that was none the wiser and would not be for some hours.

And those hours passed in a haze of alcohol-induced lust and heated passion. With the better part of a thousand dollars between us, Ruben Cienfuegos and I trawled the lower-life end of La Habana Vieja, and there we found girls who would do indescribable things for less than ten bucks Americano. We drank as if we had walked from the desert, and as morning ached its bruised and sallow way towards the horizon and color returned to the monochrome haunts of the darker underbelly of the city, we staggered half-blind and incoherent to our rooming house where I found my father sleeping the sleep of the dead. I remember stepping over him, hearing him slur and mumble unintelligibly, and I thought for a moment how easy it would have been to kneel across his chest, wrap my hands around his throat, and choke the last pathetic breath from his body as payment for what he had done to my mother. I stood over him for some time, the walls bending every which way they could, and I withheld myself. I believed it would have been too easy to kill him then, for the penance he had delivered to himself, of a broken-spirited man, a shell of whatever he once was, was far worse. I decided to let him suffer his own pains a while longer, and I crossed the room and lay down on my own mattress.

When I awoke it was late afternoon. I thought to call on Ruben and venture out once more into our hedonist’s paradise, but I stayed a while and spoke with my father. I gave him some money and told him to go out and get himself cleaned up, to buy some new clothes, to find some seventeen-year-old hooker and do his worst. He took my advice, once again pathetic and obsequious, and from the window of our room I watched him stumble away from the building towards the end of the street. I cleared my throat and spat after him. I turned my face in disgust. I could not bear to think that he had been the one to bring me into this world. I was better than him. I was Ernesto Cabrera Perez, son of my mother and of no-one else.

As the sun slipped beneath the skyline I left my room and walked down the stairwell to Ruben’s room. I knocked loudly, waited for a while, and then noticed that the door was not only unlocked but off its latch. I stepped inside. The lights were out, and where Ruben should have been, lying on his mattress, there was nothing but the sweat-stained tussle of sheets.

Perhaps he had come up to find me, and seeing me asleep had left. I knew where he would be. Down the block and across the junction was a narrow-fronted bar where he and I would meet when we became separated. I wandered down there, appreciating the feeling of freedom that so many dollars in my pocket produced, sufficient to fuel me through another week of such a lifestyle. Not a care in the world. Not a thought.

When I found no evidence of Ruben in the bar I became puzzled. I considered where he might have gone. I asked one or two of the older men if they had seen him.

‘He had many dollars,’ one of them said. ‘He was here some time ago, an hour, perhaps two, and then he left. He did not say where he was going. I didn’t ask. What you people do is none of my business.’

I left the bar and walked towards downtown. Perhaps he had gotten drunk and made his own way out to find some entertainment for the evening. I did not really care. Ruben could take care of himself. I thought to go back and get the car, the Mercury Cruiser I had driven from the motel the night before, and parade my way through the old city, pick up some girls, maybe drive out to the coast and make out on the beach. I decided against it. It was a conspicuous car, quite unlike any I had seen down here, and I did not wish to draw attention to myself.

For three hours I wandered through Old Havana. I paid a hooker to give me a blowjob in a back street but my body was so tired and replete with liquor I could not respond. I gave her money anyway, and she asked me to come visit her next time I was around. I said I would, but minutes after she had walked away I would have been unable to recognize her face. After a while they all started to look the same.

It was close to midnight when I turned back and headed home. I was angry, frustrated; irritated that Ruben had left without me, but in some way relieved. I needed to sleep. I felt poisoned with whiskey and cheap rum. I had eaten nothing since I’d woken and my body pained me greatly.

It took me the better part of an hour to reach the rooming house. The place was dark, my father had evidently not returned, and when I started up the stairs towards my room I thought to call in and check if Ruben had returned and was sleeping off his drunk.

The lights were out, the door was still open, and when I pushed it wide and stepped inside I knew that something was wrong.

The light that shone directly into my face blinded me. It was almost painful in its intensity, and before I had a chance to shout, to say something, there were hands on my shoulders. Terror, absolute breathless terror, grabbed me from behind and would not let me go. I was forced to my knees, and even as I opened my eyes once more a rough hessian bag was forced over my head and something was tied around my neck. My hands were tied, so tight I could feel the blood swelling at my wrists. My feet were behind me, and before I could move them or attempt to stand, I felt the pressure of something hard and unyielding against my forehead.

The click of the hammer was almost deafening.

The voice was unmistakably Italian.

‘You are Ernesto Perez?’ the voice asked.

I said nothing. I felt urine escape from my crotch and soak my pants. I could see the darkness that had faced me in the motel room. I could see whatever was inside me and it terrified me.

Somewhere to my left I heard a struggle. I heard a muffled voice, someone suppressing a howl of pain, and then there was silence for a heartbeat.

‘You are Ernesto Perez?’ the voice asked again.

I nodded once.

‘You killed a man in a motel last night,’ the voice stated matter-of-factly.

I didn’t move, didn’t say a word. I had lost all sensation in my hands. I could feel the veins in my neck swelling and pulsing.

‘You killed a very good friend of mine in a motel last night, and now we are going to repay his death.’

I felt the barrel of the gun stabbing at my forehead. I wanted to scream, wanted to lash out any which way I could, but with my hands tied, and the men behind me standing on my ankles, any movement was impossible.

‘Stand up,’ the voice said.

I was dragged roughly to my feet.

I could still sense the bright light shining directly towards my face even through the sacking over my head.

The light moved, back and to the left, and then with one swift motion the bag was snatched from over my face and I stood facing the man with the gun. That gun was now aimed squarely at my stomach.

I felt everything inside lurch upwards into my chest. It took every ounce of will I possessed to stop myself from screaming.

I looked to my left, and there, roped to a chair, gagged and bound like an animal waiting for slaughter, was Ruben Cienfuegos. He had been beaten within an inch of his life. His eyes were so swollen he could barely open them, his hair was matted with blood, his shirt had been torn from his shoulders and there were cigarette burns all over his skin.

I looked back at the man facing me, unquestionably an Italian. He was my father’s age, but his eyes were darker, and when he smiled and nodded there was something truly unnerving in his expression.

‘You know this man?’ he asked. He glanced towards Ruben.

I shook my head.

The man smiled and raised the gun. He aimed it directly between my eyes. I could almost hear the sound of his finger muscles tensing as he increased the pressure on the trigger.

‘You know this man?’

Once again I shook my head. I believed it would not have been possible for me to speak even had I wanted to. My throat was tight, as if a hand gripped it relentlessly, and as I tried to breathe I felt a fear so profound I believed it would stop my heart right where I stood.

The Italian shrugged. ‘Seems to me one of you is lying then,’ he said. ‘He says he knows you. He says your name is Ernesto Perez and you don’t deny it. How come he knows your name?’

I shook my head. I looked directly at the man, past the gun and straight into his eyes. ‘I-I do not know,’ I stuttered. I tried to sound certain. I tried to sound like a man speaking the truth. ‘He is a liar,’ I said.

Ruben Cienfuegos groaned painfully. He started to shake his head.

I tried to move my head, tried to look back over my shoulder. I was aware of two men standing behind me. I turned back to face the Italian once more. He had eyes like a shark, dead and without reflections. I knew that black, lightless expression would be the very last thing I saw.

I decided I would die. In that moment I decided that I would die, and if I did not die then this point would be a catharsis. If I survived this test then it would prove to me that all I had done was not wrong. This would be the confirmation of my life’s direction, and if not… well, if not, I would not have to concern myself with it any more.

I decided not to be afraid.

I thought of my mother, and the pride she would feel in my strength.

I decided that I would not be afraid, and if this man with the dead eyes killed me then I would find my mother and tell her that everything had not been in vain.

I would live, or I would see my mother again; that was my choice.

‘One of you is lying,’ the man said. ‘You admit your name is Ernesto Perez?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I am Ernesto Perez.’

‘And this one here?’ he asked, indicating Ruben with a sweep of the gun.

‘Is someone I have never seen before.’

Ruben groaned once more. I could feel his pain, but in feeling it I also began to feel nothing at all. Whatever capacity for sympathy I might have possessed had dissolved and vanished. I realized then that, in being confronted with my own death, the lives of everyone else around me became truly insignificant. This moment would be the exorcism of whatever shred of conscience and compassion I might still have owned.

‘So if this is someone you have never seen before it will mean nothing to you if he dies?’

I looked at the man. I did not flinch. Not a single muscle moved in my face. ‘Nothing at all,’ I said quietly, and then I smiled.

‘And of this man that was killed last night in the motel? This one here says that you were guilty of his murder, that he was not there and you were the one who killed him.’

I shook my head. ‘If he was not there then how does he know anything about it?’ I asked.

‘You are saying he is a liar?’

‘I am,’ I replied. I felt my heart slow. I felt my pulse in my neck. I felt the tension in my head and heart start to ease. I believed that I had never lied so well in my life.

‘And what does that say about you… you can stand there and let another man defame and slander your name? Let a man call you a murderer and you do nothing?’

I stared back at the Italian. ‘I will exact my vengeance at the appropriate time.’

The Italian laughed, threw his head back and laughed out loud. ‘Quando fai i piani per la vendetta,’ he said, and the two men behind me started laughing also.

‘You exact your vengeance now,’ he said, ‘or both of you die here in this room.’

I looked at Ruben, could see that he was straining to make eye contact with me out of the swollen wreck of his face.

‘You pay for the death of my friend and you clear your own name with this killing,’ the Italian said. ‘You prove yourself a man, my little Cuban friend, and you preserve your own life.’ He smiled once more. ‘We have a deal?’

‘We do,’ I said, and I glanced once more towards Ruben.

The Italian stepped back, lowered his gun, and moved to the side of the room. The two men behind me untied my hands and I stood there, my heart thundering in my chest, sweat running down my entire body, my hands shaking violently as the blood rushed back into them and gave them feeling once more.

The Italian nodded. One of the men behind me stepped forward and handed me a tire lever.

‘There are two hundred and six bones in the human body,’ the Italian said. ‘I want to hear you break every single one.’

Later, much later, seated on the floor in my own room, the Italian told me his name.

‘Giancarlo Ceriano,’ he stated, and he lit two cigarettes, one of which he passed to me. I looked at him then, looked at him for the first time without death staring back at me. He was dressed immaculately, everything about him precise and exact and tailored. His hands were manicured, his hair smooth, his every movement somehow graceful but in no way anything but masculine. Ceriano seemed like something feral, something between a man and an animal, and yet elegant and discerning and very intelligent.

‘I know you killed the man in the motel room,’ he went on. ‘Do not question how I know this, and do not deny it. You will offend me greatly if you lie to me now.’ He looked at me with his black deadlight eyes. ‘I am right, no?’

‘You are right,’ I said.

Ceriano nodded and smiled. ‘His name was Pietro Silvino. He worked for a man called Trafficante. You have heard of Trafficante?’

I shook my head.

‘Trafficante is a very important man, a very good friend of mine. He possesses interests in some of the casinos out here, the Sans Souci, the Comodoro and the Capri. He believes in family, he believes in honor and integrity, and it would break his heart to learn that his friend, a member of his own family, a man with a wife and three beautiful children, was out here paying boys for sex… you understand?’

‘I understand.’

Ceriano flicked the ash of his cigarette on the floor. ‘In some way you have spared Don Trafficante’s family a great deal of heartbreak by killing Silvino before such a thing was discovered, and though I can in no way condone your action, I am nevertheless impressed by your unwillingness to stand down in the face of your own death. You have a brave spirit, my little Cuban friend. I am impressed by your performance, and there is perhaps some work you might be interested in.’

‘Some work?’

‘We are the foreigners here. We stand out in the crowd. People know who we are and what we are doing here. We do not speak your language, and nor do we understand well your customs and rituals. But a native-’

‘I am from New Orleans,’ I said. ‘I am an American, and I was born in New Orleans.’

Ceriano widened his eyes and smiled. He started laughing. ‘From New Orleans?’ he asked, in his voice a tone of surprise.

I nodded. ‘Yes. My father is Cuban, but my mother was from America. He went there and married her. I was born over there, but we came here recently after my mother died.’

Ceriano shook his head. ‘I am sorry for the death of your mother, Ernesto Perez.’

‘As am I,’ I replied.

‘So, New Orleans,’ Ceriano said. ‘You have heard of Louis Prima?’

I shrugged.

‘Louis Prima was born in Storyville, Louisiana. The singer. Plays with Sam Buttera and the Witnesses? You know… “Buona Sera”, “Lazy River”, “Banana Split For My Baby”… and what was that other one?’ Ceriano looked at one of his henchmen. ‘Aah,’ he said, and with a wide smile on his face he started singing, ‘I eat antipasta twice just because she is so nice… Angelina… Angelina, waitress at the pizzeria… Angelina zooma-zooma, Angelina zooma-zooma…’

I smiled with him. The man seemed as crazy as a shithouse rat.

He waved his hand aside nonchalantly. ‘Whatever… so you are an American, eh?’

‘I am.’

‘But you speak like a Cuban.’

‘I do.’

‘Then, for us, you shall be a Cuban, you understand?’

I nodded. ‘I understand.’

‘And you shall do some work for us here in Havana, and we shall pay you well and protect you, and if you serve us we shall perhaps let you keep Pietro Silvino’s beautiful car, right?’

‘Right,’ I said, because I believed I had no choice, but more than that I truly believed that here I had been presented with an opportunity to fulfil my vocation, to find my place in the world, to return to America with enough money and power to make my mark. I remembered a sign I had seen over the Alvarez School. Sin educacion no hay revolucion posible. Without education, revolution is not possible.

Here was my education. Here was a way into a world I could only ever have dreamed about.

Here was my escape route, and with people such as these behind, beside and ahead of me I foresaw no repercussions, no consequences, no obstacles.

Here was the American Dream, its darker edges, yes, its blackened underbelly, but a dream all the same, and I wanted that dream so much I could taste it.

They left that night, Giancarlo Ceriano and his henchmen, and with them they took the broken remains of my blood-brother, Ruben Cienfuegos. Where they took him and what they did with his devastated body I do not know. I did not ask. I had learned already that with people such as this you answered, but you did not ask. They frightened me, but I found that I respected them as much as any people I had ever known. I recognized their brutality, their passion, their seeming ability to swiftly despatch both the living and the dead. Theirs was a different world, a greater world, a world of violence and love, of family and greater fortune.

As he left Don Ceriano said, ‘We shall tell Don Trafficante and Pietro Silvino’s family that he was murdered by a Cuban thief. We shall tell them also that you were the one to identify the thief and to kill him. You will earn yourself a name, a small name, my little Cuban friend, but a name nevertheless. We will call on you again, and we will talk of business together, you understand?’

‘I understand,’ I replied, and believed – perhaps for the first time in my life – that I had walked into something that could be understood.

I did not sleep that night. I lay awake on my mattress, and out through the window I could see the stars punctuating the blackness of the night sky.

In my mind circles turned and within each circle a shadow, and behind each shadow the face of my mother. She said nothing; she merely looked back at me with a sense of wonder and of awe.

‘I have become someone,’ I whispered to her, and though she did not reply I knew – I just knew – that someone was all she had ever wished me to be.