Havana

Chapter 56

There was no way to sleep. The orange burn of the lamps at the marquee of the Shanghai flooded through the window of the small apartment across Zanja Street; its flickery intensity was unstoppable. You could not escape it. In the room, it penetrated everywhere, not only on sheer power but also by its imperfect wiring, which filled the air with crackle and hum and the on-again, off-again buzz of the ever-pulsing middle letter "g."

He curled away from it and hallucinated sleep, but sooner or later that buzz cut the darkness, his eyes popped open, and he saw the fireglow on the wall. Once so disturbed, he could not recover unconsciousness. He'd rise, and turn, and there she'd be.

Esmerelda didn't talk. She didn't sleep. She just looked at him worshipfully, as if adoring a saint. By the second day it had begun to weigh heavily upon him. If she'd spoken his language, he'd have screamed: What do you want? Why are you staring at me? Are you crazy? It's not right to stare at anyone like that.

But she just stared, dumb and adoring. She was hefty, he now saw, and without makeup quite appalling. The beauty and body that Congressman Harry Etheridge had tumbled for and tried to capture didn't really exist; they were the delusions of an old man who thought of sex too often and hunted it everywhere.

Her skin was pockmarked. Her teeth were false. Sometime back in a terrible past, someone had cut her badly and the lace-work of scars embraced her throat, ran down her chest to the dark hollow between her immense breasts. Not that they were beautiful breasts-not like the plush, streamlined ones on the long-gammed, flouncy-skirt babes pilots painted on their bombers during the war. No, unsupported, they flattened like sacks of flower, slapping this way and that under her blouse. Her hair was black and greasy. She had a mole next to her left nostril. Her nose had a blunt, hard-busted quality. Her fingers were stubs, her arms were sheathed in flesh, and her behind was a hemisphere all its own.

On the first night, she'd been all tarted up, open for business. On that occasion, her cheeks were artificially red, her lips swollen also with red. Makeup caked her face, pinkish on the cheeks, crusted black above her eyes. Earl thought: Only a bosun's mate at sea a year could harden up for this poor old woman.

She had to be forty, well used, much saddled, much infected and reinfected, much rotted. She was in her knowledge of what men want and do beyond surprise, but for one: her love of Earl.

He had in some inadvertent way pried open the gates that held back her emotions, that had been hammered shut by twenty-five years of pimps cutting and beating her, johns screwing her or demanding yet more recondite pleasures, mamasitas treating her like meat, her pay for all that agony and debasement a few dreary pesos, a dollar now and then, and then back in daylight to her little chamber across from the Shanghai, to be alone with her fears and doubts.

Now she had only Saint Earl to worship. Jesus didn't do the trick any more, though he still hung in agony two or three times in each tiny room of the tiny apartment.

Sweetie, he thought, you sure as hell could have done better than this old man.

But not by her lights. She gazed at him adoringly. She touched him sexually the first night, as if to say, whatever, whatever you want.

He shook his head no, and it only made her love him more. He took his wallet out and showed her a picture of Junie, the one taken at the USO party at Southeast Missouri State Teachers College, when he'd been on bond tour in January of 1945, where he'd fallen in love with Junie, and one day after the picture was taken they'd gotten married, and one week after the marriage he'd left to rejoin the battalion for the invasion of Iwo Jima.

"My wife," he'd said loudly, "my wife," not knowing the Spanish for it, but hoping that she'd see in Junie's delicate beauty, the upturn of her nose, the flaxen quality of her hair, the perfection of her lips, the warmth in her gray eyes why he loved his wife so, even if, truly, he thought she now had disengaged from him and all his damned adventuring.

But Esmerelda didn't understand. Oh, she understood the wife part, but she didn't see how that equaled chastity. She seemed to believe that yes, he loved his wife, wasn't that wonderful, now let's cuddle and fuck.

"No," he said, seeing the hurt it administered, wishing he didn't have to hurt her. "No." And he wondered, how do I explain? I have to stay true to this woman. It's all I have left in this world.

Esmerelda had touched him on the inside of the thigh.

"No," he said, "my wife. My wife."

That was three days ago. Now it was only waiting. Esmerelda didn't leave in the night. She was his sentinel. In daylight, she went out with some money he gave her and came back with food: egg sandwiches, rice and beans, a pint of milk, some banana-like chips fried as if they were potatoes, and on that he subsisted.

He was scared.

Earl was scared.

Not like this. Really, no, there had to be a better way. He looked around for a weapon and only a paring knife was capable of taking human life, or possibly an old chair could be broken up and yield a club. But of course what he wanted was a gun. Without a gun, up against heavily armed men, he knew he was lost.

He thought about sneaking out in the night, conking a cop and taking one of those 9mm Stars they had, that looked just like.45s. Or maybe he'd be even luckier and come across the one in three officers who toted a tommy gun.

He obsessed on it. Just a good roundhouse to the side of the head, not too hard, and the guy would be down and out for an hour. You grab the gun, and you feel the dense solidity of it, the purposefulness of it. Nothing feels better than a gun to a man who's hunted or hated or been oppressed or beaten. He can lose his imagination in it, because he knows that no matter what they do to him, if he uses it well, they will remember that night, their widows will cry and their orphans will beg. That is something to a man who has no other thing. God, he wanted a gun.

But he knew if he conked a cop, it would get to his hunters and they'd know the neighborhood, and they'd start busting down doors and smacking people around, and once they did, someone, someone, would talk. Someone had seen something. Someone always does.

So there was nothing. He, in the tiny apartment, Esmerelda staring intently at him, as if he were religious.

I ain't no saint, honey, he thought.

Time crept by, harshly. It seemed to crawl up stairs littered with broken glass. It took many a break to catch its breath. It was not a busy little worker. He finally took his damned watch off, because he kept checking it, and it would not move.

It was late, yet still the traffic ran up and down Zanja Street. Men went into and out of the Shanghai Theater or gathered laughingly and drunkenly at the Cafe Bambu a couple doors down from it. All glowed orange intermittently.

He watched the smoking men, the strutting women, the prowling cars; he heard the hoots, the whistles, the shouts, the clash of a dozen languages-but he saw nothing, not now.

He withdrew from the window, turned, and there was Esmerelda staring at him, her dumb eyes filled with love.

He smiled back, uneasily, wishing he had something to do, and then he heard men on the steps. They were trying to be quiet but they were approaching steadily.

Walter was having dinner with the head of United Fruit's marketing division, his wife, his daughter and his son. They were at the Tropicana, the world's most beautiful nightclub, and the meal was fabulous, even if now the waiters scurried to clear it, and deliver a last round of drinks before the floor show.

Stew Grant was a terrific guy and his wife, Sam-Sam! — was one of those eastern horsewomen types Frenchy loved so, but could never speak to. And the kids, Tim and Julie, were wonderful, the best American teenagers anyone could hope for. The subjects had ranged from Korea to Senator McCarthy-Stew thought he was a great man-to this new star Rock Hudson to United Fruit's prospects in its business arrangement with General Foods and this idea for dehydrating fruit to package in cereals, which looked very promising. But Frenchy couldn't take his eyes off the tanned, thin and aristocratic Sam, and she couldn't take her eyes off him. After all, he was…well, he was the government's man in Havana, and-

"Senor Short?"

"Yes?"

"A phone call. Urgent."

"Jesus Christ. I am―"

"It's from Mr. Lansky."

"Ah."

Frenchy excused himself, followed the waiter back through tables to a house phone, and picked it up.

"What's up? News?"

"They have him."

"What?"

"They have him. They're moving in now."

Frenchy's heart danced.

"You're sure."

"I am. Someone saw something and told someone and one of your snitches got it to the cops who got it to me. We're dealing with it now."

"It's a great night," said Frenchy.

Then he checked himself. Great night: Earl dead. Same thing. And in the next second, by his special gift, he denied the flood of regret that came over him, and hastened back to the table. The floor show was about to begin.

Now it was happening. It would happen here, in this little room, with no toilet. Men with guns were coming for him and they would kill him. It couldn't be a whore with her trick, for they'd be talking bravely. It couldn't be an old lady, for she wouldn't be creeping, she'd be walking brazenly. No, it was men, moving silently, maneuvering for position, trying to set up for a swift, brutal assault.

I will make a good fight, he told himself.

He gathered her up, soothingly, and slid her along the wall to a closet, gently pressed her into it and urged her down, into a ball. The bullets would be sprayed if he knew these boys, and they'd find her too, but that was the way it went.

He slid back, edging along the wall silently, because he knew they'd be listening for him. In his left hand he held the paring knife, and he'd taken a belt from one of her pitiful dresses and tied it around the hand, so that if he were hit or stabbed, and in pain opened his hand, his only weapon wouldn't fly away, irrecoverable.

I can get at least one, he thought. I can cut the first man through bad, and maybe I can get his gun from him, and maybe I can get it into play fast enough and maybe I can get another couple. Maybe I can get that goddamned New York boy, that rat, and maybe he's with the captain who cuts out the eyes and I can get him, too. If you're going out, you want to take some bad'uns with you.

Now it was silent.

He knew they were there and he knew there were at least three, because he'd heard the cracking of floorboards simultaneously from different spots as they crept along, which meant it wasn't his Russian pal, who always worked alone. Three would be about right to kill one man, unarmed, by surprise. Two would do it, but three was right, and that would be Frankie, the captain and whomever was driving the car.

It was three.

The room was filled with flickering orange from the dirty window. Honks and squeals from outside filled the air. No sound came from nearby, but under the blade of light admitted by the crack beneath the door, he saw a shape move, then another. Two men had passed in front of the door to get to the other side.

He tensed.

He watched as someone gently tested the knob. It was locked, though there was no deadbolt. It was quiet, then a thin blade appeared, sliding through the crack in the door and up to the lock, where it rested, steadied itself, began to hunt for leverage, and quickly enough got the lock released.

Earl tensed, feeling his own little knife, which could slash but not reach deep enough to get a good, blood-filled organ.

Not here, he thought.

The door opened, gently. He heard scuffling, then a voice.

"Anyone in there care to buy a vacuum cleaner?"