Cuba Libre (2008) (6 page)

The soldiers were in every street, in groups or pairs, boys in blue-striped seersucker and straw hats with regimental badges, like tourists taking in the sights of the city. Many of these boys, Fuentes said, from Andalusia and the Canary Is lands. The somewhat older men in light gray uniforms were Guardia Civil. They stood about with thumbs hooked in their black leather belts waiting to be noticed, or daring you to look them in the face. That was the feeling Tyler got seeing them again on the street and remembering how they would ride into the mill looking for a fugitive--a man who might have committed only a minor crimemransack the workers' living quarters, chase down suspects and sympathizers and beat them. They threatened to shoot his dad one time, when he tried to keep them off the mill property.

They walked past a pair of Guardia posing on a street corner and Tyler said to Fuentes, "My dad called them barbarians, thugs, I forgot what else. What do you call them?"

"Usually," Fuentes said, "I call them sir. The Guardia are known for their loyalty, devotion to duty and lack of feelings. Imagine an insensitive brute having absolute power over people he considers his inferiors. Since they see themselves as infallible, I have no reason to antagonize them."

"I've been trying to figure out," Tyler said, "what side you're on, for Spanish rule or a free Cuba."

Fuentes grinned, his mahogany face shining in the lights of an open-air cafe. "And what side do you think?"

"The landowners, even Americans," Tyler said, "are for Spanish rule, happy with the way things are. If you're sitting on top, why change it? And since you work for one of the biggest landowners in Cuba..."

"Also a man of influence," Fuentes said. "It's in your best interest to agree with him." "Yes, if I want to be paid."

"Or at least appear to agree with him."

"So what side am I on?"

"I think you're for Cuba and to hell with Spain."

"If I tell you yes, you're right, would you believe me?"

Tyler hesitated. "Yeah, but I'd keep an eye on you."

"That's the way to be," Fuentes said. "Don't trust anyone. Or look around when I tell you we're being followed."

Tyler half-turned to look over his shoulder, then up at the decorative tiled facade of a building, at people in windows and doorways talking, girls in white dresses looking out at the street from behind grillwork.

"The first thing you do is what I tell you not to," Fuentes said. "It's all right. The one following is from the police; he wants to know if you are who you say you are. Maybe someone else is following, but I'm not sure, so don't worry about it."

They walked back to the hotel, Tyler in his new duds and carrying packages, shirts and underwear and his old hat he couldn't part with wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Everything else had been left at stores to be thrown away or offered to beggars. He kept touching his panama, not trusting the airy feel of it. When Fuentes told him he looked splendid, Tyler grinned. He liked Fuentes and liked Havana. The old part, la Habana Vieja, made him think of New Orleans: a look he remembered of shaded galleries and shutters closed against the heat, old government buildings and banana trees and broad esplanades, cannons, monuments. Havana had Morro Castle and La Cabafia fortress; New Orleans had Fort Pike on the Rigolets, Fort Jackson in Plaquemines Parish, another fort down on Grand Terre you could count. The narrow streets here were like streets in the Quarter, St. Philip, where they lived before moving to Terpsichore and he went to St. Simeon's Select on Annunciation, there two years when his mother and sisters took sick and died and he left to go west and work for a cattle outfit. The lobby of the Inglaterra, all lit up, could be the St. Charles and the dining room in there could be any number of restaurants in New Orleans, tile floor, white tablecloths, and mirrors on the walls. All kinds of things here reminded him of a hometown he'd been away from half his life. It was strange to feel at home here.

Fuentes gave the packages to a bellboy to put in Tyler's room. He took a breath and said, "All right, now I see about Mr. Boudreaux and come and get you when he's ready."

Tyler said fine and headed for the bar.

"I see you come in," Charlie Burke said, acting puzzled, "I was about to say to Neely, "Do I know that fella?" My Lord, stand there and let me look at you." Charlie Burke with his hat on, a cigar stuck in his jaw, enjoying his evening at the Inglaterra. Men at the next table, correspondents, looked over and Neely Tucker had a grin on his face.

He said to Tyler, "Join us, please," in his eager way, rising, pulling out a chair for him, then got the waiter to bring a rye whiskey with ice. Neely seemed anxious for people to like him, younger than the other correspondents and didn't seem full of himself like some Tyler had overheard, here and in the lobby, talking in loud voices to each other, ordering the help around, complaining to waiters, asking them where they'd been hiding. This bar, with its formal garden in the middle of the room, its gold statue of a woman flamenco dancer, was the correspondents' hangout. "Where rumors and fabrications are created to justify hotel bills," Neely had said, when they'd met in here earlier. "Some can stir up sentiment against Spain with mordant diatribes, recount eyewitness scenes of atrocity without leaving this room. That's not to say, you understand, atrocities aren't committed. Lots of them are, all the time."

Tyler had seen correspondents using their typewriting machines in here, smoking cigars, drinking, typing away.

On that earlier occasion Neely Tucker had said, "You don't remember, but we met one time before."

Tyler said no, he didn't recall, though he'd read enough of Neely's stories to feel like he knew him. The Chicago Times was the newspaper Dana Moon used to send him when he was at Yuma--editions of the paper, it turned out, Neely had sent Moon.

"We met in Sweetmary five years ago," Neely said, "when LaSalle Mining was trying to run those squatters off the mountain and Dana Moon stood up to the company and its gun thugs. It was in the Gold Dollar. All us correspondents were in there trying to decide what to call the situation, a war, a bloody feud, or what. Everyone felt we needed a catchy label, like the Rincon Mountain War was one, the Sweetmary War another. You were at the bar right next to me. You recall what you said?"

Tyler shook his head. "I must've been drinking."

"You said, quote, "You people come out here not knowing mesquite beans from goat shit and become the authority on whatever catches your eye.""

"Yeah, I was drinking." Tyler nodded, thinking of the time. "But it didn't make what I said less true, did it?"

"Ben Tyler went to the tenth grade," Charlie Burke said. "He can be quite the authority his own self", sounding to Tyler like Charlie Burke was still smarting over the incident at the stock pens, missing the chance to sell a horse.

Neely was grinning again. He said, "I would have quoted your remark in a dispatch had it not been indelicate to do so."

"He was in a period of his life," Charlie Burke said, "where he made up his own rules of behavior. I thought he'd worked it out of his system busting rocks, but now I'm not so sure."

This was earlier in the evening.

Charlie Burke's mood had mellowed now with the rye whiskey. He said, "I saw you come in, I thought for a moment you were Richard Harding Davis, but Neely says he's over in France. I saw him a time before. There's a man knows how to dress."

"He knows how to write, too," Neely said. "Richard Harding Davis and this young fellow Stephen Crane. Their ability to produce a feeling of verisimilitude is scary. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage when he was only twenty four Have you read it?"

"I've heard of it," Tyler said, looking around the room at all the correspondents.

"Last year," Neely said, "Crane wrote "The Open Boat' about a shipwreck; it's based on an experience that actually happened on one of his trips here to Cuba. "The Open Boat' offers some of the most vivid writing I've ever read. It isn't flowery, if you know what I mean; it's stark, you might say, without a single wasted word. I say that, not taking anything away from Harding Davis. The Journal pays him three thousand a month--not a year, a month. Harper's Monthly paid him six hundred for a single story and he's worth every penny. Read "The Death of Rodriguez' that ran last month, about the execution of a young rebel. The boy falls dead before the firing squad and Harding Davis wrote that at that moment the sun 'shot up suddenly from behind them in all the splendor of the tropics, a fierce red disc of heat, and filled the air with warmth and light.... The whole world of Santa Clara seemed to stir and stretch itself and to wake to welcome the day just begun.""

"That's writing," Charlie Burke said.

"Wait," Neely said. "The way Harding Davis ends it, he looks back as he walks away"--Neely looking off as he said it--"and in this tragic moment sees the young Cuban as if, quote, 'asleep in the wet grass, his motionless arms still bound tightly behind him, the scapular awry across his face, and the blood from his breast sinking into the soil he had tried to free.""

"Gives you a chill," Charlie Burke said. "You say this was in Santa Clara?"

Neely's gaze came back to the table, his expression reverent, the neat little correspondent touching his bow tie and nodding as he said, "Santa Clara has long been a hotbed of insurgent activity, a soil that seems to nourish a love of freedom."

It amazed Tyler, people actually spoke like that. He saw Fuentes looking for them as he came in from the lobby and around the garden, coming over now and pausing as he reached the table, making sure he wasn't interrupting their conversation.

Charlie Burke looked up. "Boudreaux's ready for us?" "He's with business associates and his lady friend, but he say okay," Fuentes said and looked at Tyler. "Lionel Tavalera, the Guardia Civil officer? Is in the lobby."

Neely seemed surprised. "Spanish military don't often frequent this hotel."

"It's true," Fuentes said. They were getting up from the table as he said, "Who knows why he's here." And to Tyler, "But, listen, you don't have to speak to him. All right?"

The municipal police investigator, Rudi Calvo, had noticed him too: the Guardia Civil officer in civilian clothes, a dark suit this evening, seated in one of the wicker chairs smoking a cigarette. Lionel Tavalera, who wanted to know about the American and was here perhaps to get a look at him. Or he could be waiting for one of the American newspaperwomen, popular with officers because as a rule they drank spirits, some of them smoked and none required a chaperone. So Lionel Tavalera's presence didn't give Rudi the same uneasy. feeling he had experienced seeing that other one, Teo Barban, lingering in the streets of the Old City. There...

Tyler was coming out of the bar now with his associate and Fuentes, crossing the lobby to the dining room, Fuentes leading the parade, this Ben Tyler looking very smart in his new clothes, very fly, as the Americans would say. Tyler knew how to wear that hat.

By this time Rudi had forgotten about Lionel Tavalera and didn't see him get up from his chair.

Tyler did. t-Ie saw the Guardia officer coming toward them and raised his hand. "Lionel, how're you this evening?"

"A moment," Tavalera said. "I need to tell you something."

"Can't do it right now, got business to tend to."

Now Charlie Burke looked around as Tavalera was saying, "Listen to me. The man you insulted is outside, Teobaldo. He wants to speak to you."

Tyler gave him a shrug, not caring for the Guardia's tone of voice, and said to Charlie Burke, "I doubt he still wants the horse, but I'll see him later if he's around," and followed his partner to this private dining room in a corner of the lobby, the door closed. He had noticed the regular dining room over next to the bar, people in there were having supper this late. Fuentes, about to knock, paused and turned to them.

"The one who opens the door," Fuentes said, barely above a whisper, "is Novis, Mr. Boudreaux's bodyguard, Novis Crowe. He looks at you as if you must be guilty of something or you want to harm his boss." Fuentes said, "I'm telling you so you know who it is," turned now and rapped twice on the door.

It opened right away and now the bodyguard, Novis, stood looking them over the way Fuentes said he would as Fuentes asked if Mr. Boudreaux would see them now. Novis didn't answer, his gaze holding on Tyler now, Tyler seeing Novis as a working man in a town suit, reddish hair combed flat and parted in the middle; or he could be a strikebreaker, that type, with a pick handle and a mean disposition. He turned now and brought them into the private dining room one behind the other, leading a procession along the banquet table covered in white linen, cleared of dinner plates, to approach four men in evening dress with cigars grouped about one end: prosperous-looking gents in their middle years, beards showing gray, though the one Tyler took to be Roland Boudreaux, seated in the center with a map spread open in front of him, was clean shaven and somewhat younger looking, a wave in his full head of dark hair. All of them seemed intent on following a course Boudreaux was slowly tracing across the map with the tip of a table knife.

Fuentes peeked around Novis, waited, and then finally said, "Sir, when you are ready." Tyler waited for Boudreaux to look up and acknowledge them. The men with him, Americans, all appeared well-to-do, patient, content to follow Boudreaux's plan for a road or maybe a rail line that would extend across half of Cuba.