LaBrava

Chapter 11

THERE WAS THE Had a Piece Lately Bar. There was the Play House, the Turf Pub. There was Cheeky's. "Don't go in there without me," Cundo Rey said. "They liable to tear you to pieces, fight over you."

"Queers," Nobles said. "I love queers. Jesus."

There was Pier Park. Go in there at night and get anything you want, light up your head.

Nobles said, "Those guys have dough, huh, that sell it."

Cundo Rey said, "Yes, is true." Low behind the wheel of the Trans Am, holding the beast in as they cruised, he said, "But they got guns."

Nobles said, "Shit, who hasn't."

They cruised Collins Avenue and Washington, staying south of the Lincoln Road Mall, Nobles peering through smoked glass at the activity along the streets, all the little eating places and stores and bitty hotels, every one of the hotels with those metal chairs out front. Nobles said, "You ever see so many foreigners in your life?" After a few more blocks of sightseeing he said, "I think I'm having an idea."

Cundo Rey was learning not to say anything important unless he was sure Nobles was listening. Nobles didn't listen to very much. Sometimes Cundo wanted to tie him to a chair and press a knife against him and say, "Listen to me!" Shout it in the man's ear.

He said, "I thought you had an idea already."

"I got all kinds of 'em."

He was listening. Talk about him, he listened.

"The woman is still there," Cundo Rey said. "I saw her again. The guy is there, I think. I didn't see him good to know what he look like, but he's there. Why wouldn't he be, if he live there?"

"I'm waiting on the spirit to move me. It ain't the same as heisting cars, Jose. You gotta be in tune." Nose pressed to the side window. "You know what it's like down here, you read the signs? It's like being in a foreign country."

"You want to hear my idea?" Cundo Rey said.

"I want to get something to eat, partner. My tummy says it's time."

"Listen to my idea."

"Well, go ahead."

"Shoot the guy," Cundo Rey said. "You want to shoot him, shoot him. You want to shoot him in the back, get it over with, it's okay. You want to use a knife, you want to push him off a roof--any way you like, okay."

"That's some idea, chico."

"No, that's not the idea. That's to get him out of the way, so you can think of the woman."

"Watch the road. I don't want us having a accident."

"Okay, you want the woman? You know how to get her?"

"I'm certainly anxious to hear."

"You save her life."

"I save her life. Like out swimming?"

"Listen to me, all right? You listening?"

"Go ahead."

"She gets a call on the telephone or she gets a letter that say, Pay me some money or I'm going to kill you. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand--how much has she got? You have to figure that out, how much you want to ask for. Okay, then you find the guy that sent her the letter and kill him. You her hero and she loves you. She say, take me, take my money, anything you want, baby, I'm yours."

"I find the guy sent her the letter..."

"Exactly."

"What guy?"

"Any guy. What difference does it make? Go in the La Playa Hotel, down the end of this street, is full of guys you can use. Set the guy up--don't you know anything? Make it look like he's the guy, see. Tell him to come to her room in the hotel--somebody want to buy some poppers from him. He goes up there, you shoot him. The woman say, 'Oh, my hero, you save my life.' She give you anything you want."

"That's how you do it, huh?"

"Listen, maybe even you use the guy you want to shoot anyway. Is it possible? If he's on drugs maybe?"

"Little shit, he's gonna need something for pain, anyhow."

"But the best part--"

"That's if I don't put him all the way outta his misery."

"You listening to me?"

"I thought you was through."

"The best part," Cundo Rey said, "see, the woman is so ascared she pays the money. She leaves it some place the letter tells her. You comprehend? See, then you shoot the guy. The guy is dead and the police, nobody, they look in the guy's place, but nobody can find the money. You like it?"

Nobles said, "You been reading the funnypaper, haven't you? I love to hear boogers like you talking about setting people up and shooting 'em--Lord have mercy, like you done it all and taken the midnight train more'n once, huh? Cundo, you little squirt, let's go get us something to eat."

A place called Casa Blanca looked fine to Cundo. Nobles said he didn't feel like eating Mex. Cundo tried to tell him it was a Cuban place, there was a big difference. Nobles said dago chow was dago chow. He picked Eli's Star Deli on Collins near Fourteenth, saying he had never ate any Jew food before, he'd like to give her a try.

So they went in. Nobles had a Henny Youngman on rye, said hey, boy, sucking his teeth, and ordered a Debbie Reynolds on pumpernickel. He told Cundo, watching him pick at his cole slaw, he ate like a goddamn owl. He picked--why didn't he eat?

Cundo Rey tried Nobles with, "See, they all in the yard, all around the embassy of Peru, all these thousands of people waiting to leave Havana when it first started, when Fidel decided okay. But they don't have no food. So you know what they ate? They ate a papaya tree, man. The whole tree. Then they ate a dog. You know what else they ate? They ate cats, man. They killed and ate the cats."

Nobles said, "Yeah?" admiring the thickness of his Debbie Reynolds, tucking in the fat ends of corned beef hanging out.

There was no way to make him sick, to make him even stop to make a face. Look at him, sucking his teeth, waving at the man in the apron behind the meat counter, telling him he wanted a dish of potato salad.

Cundo Rey said, "Would you pay thirty dollars for a chicken? A cooked one?"

"Fried or roast chicken?"

"If you were starving?"

"Would I get biscuits and gravy?"

"At Mariel it was like a parking lot of boats waiting to leave, a thousand of them, it was so crowded with all kinds of boats. We sitting there for days and days, everybody running out of food and water. Now this boat is like a cantina comes to you. Is painted blue. The man on it offer you a cooked chicken for thirty dollars. Black beans, ten dollars a pound. Bottle of rum, eighty dollars."

"Where's this at?"

"I just tole you. Mariel. You never hear of Mariel?" Almost gritting his teeth, Christ, trying to talk to this guy. "The name don't mean nothing to you?"

"Yeah, I heard of it. You're talking about your boatlift back--when was that, three four years ago, brought all you boogers up here. Yeah, shit, I'd had me a boat I'd a gone down there made some dough."

"You know what it cost to leave Havana? What they charge people? Thousand dollars. More than that--some of them, they think you have the money, they charge you ten thousand dollars."

"It's what I'm saying. Get a old beat-up shrimper cheap, pack about five hundred of you squirts aboard--shit, you could retire, never work again long as you live."

"If you don't get fined, put in jail by the Coast Guard when you come back from there," Cundo Rey said. "Listen, they put twenty of us on a cruiser, a charter-boat, a nice one about ten meters with the name Barbara Rose on the back. From Key West."

"That's Barb'ra Rose, you spook."

"The captain, this tough guy, say he only suppose to pick up five people, that's all he was paid for. See, he got their names, given to him by their people in Miami. They came down to Key West to hire the boat. Thousands of people were doing that, to get their relatives. But see, the G-two man from Fidel say to the captain, you think so, but you going to take four for one, twenty people. See, so the rest of us on the boat, with this family that was paid for, we all from Cambinado. Brought to Mariel in a truck."

"What's Camba-nato?"

"Jesus Christ, it's the prison, Cambinado del Este. I told you I was in there--I picked up a suitcase in a hotel I find out belong to a Russian. I sell his big Russian shoes for ninety dollars--is how bad it is in Cuba, man--and a shirt, you know, that kind with the reptile on it. Where did the Russian get it? I don't know, but I sell it for fifty dollars. They give me life in prison."

"You poor little bugger, I thought they put you away for being queer."

"They put plenty of them in Cambinado, yes, and plenty of them come here, too."

"Let's go find some," Nobles said, "and kick the shit out of 'em." He licked mustard from his fingers. "Yeah, I wish I had me a boat that time."

"Not if you talk to the captain of the Barbara Rose," Cundo said. "He look at twenty people crowded in his boat, no food, a hundred and ten miles of ocean and if he reaches here he's going to make five thousand dollars."

"I don't know if I'd get seasick or not. I doubt it, but I don't know. Biggest boat--you might not believe this--I ever been in's a canoe."

"You hear what I'm telling you? The captain, this tough guy, don't like it. So all he does is complain."

"No, I been in a bird-dog boat, too, up on the Steinhatchee. But it wasn't no bigger'n a canoe."

"Listen, the captain of the boat is complaining, he's saying, 'Oh, I could go to jail. I could be fined. I could lose my business, this sixty-thousand-dollar boat because of you people. Why did I come here? Look at the ocean, the choppiness all the way.' Man, all he did was complain."

"Yeah, but he took you to Key West, didn't he? And he made out pretty good."

"First we had to lock him up in the below part, while we waiting for the approval to leave."

"You did?"

"Then, it's time to go, he say it's a mutiny, he wants to leave the boat. No, first call the Coast Guard on the radio, then leave the boat. But then, finally, we leave."

"He saw the light."

"He saw the knife we got holding against his back. We leave Mariel, but still he complain, never shut up. He complain so much," Cundo Rey said, "we come to think, this is enough. So we throw him in the ocean and take his boat up to a place, it isn't too far from Homestead, and run it in the ground, in the sand. We have to walk, oh, about a hundred meters in the water to get to shore, but is okay, we make it."

Nobles said, "Well, you little squirt, you surprise the hell outta me."

Cundo was staring back at him, giving Nobles his nothing-to-it sleepy look.

"Why you think I was in Cambinado del Este?"

"You said you stole a suitcase, belonged to a Russian."

Cundo had Nobles' attention now, Nobles hooked, hanging on, wanting to know more.

"I took it out of his room, yes."

"And the Russian got a good look at you, huh?"

"Yes, of course. Why else would I have to kill him?"

The little Cuban dude kept staring right at him, playing with his earring in his girlish way, nose stuck up in the air like he was the prize.

It took Nobles a few moments to adjust--wait a sec here, what's this shit he's pulling?--and think to say, "Well, you shoot one of those fellas up here you don't even need a per-mit. Now you want me to tell you my idea? How me and you can make some quick bucks while we're waiting on the big one?"