Night Work (32 page)

“We have that covered,” Stassi said. Trafficante said nothing. He drank more grappa and watched Fuentes with cold eyes.

“You have it covered?”

“Yes.”

So, they own some cops. “It's still a three-hundred-yard shot.”

“These guys are good. We've used them before. Even if the triggerman misses,” Stassi said. “There'll be a lot of confusion. A perfect opportunity for a guy who's in close. Your guy. He could take advantage.”

“I see.” Their man shoots. If he misses, Lopato finishes the job. And if he is caught, well it would not be a problem for these men.

“Can your man do that?”

“Oh, yes.”

They talked details for a while, and then Fuentes stood to go. Trafficante struggled up from his chair and needed a hand on the table to steady himself. “The next time I see you, Colonel, we'll be back in Havana, and everything will be back the way it was.”

The three men shook hands, and Fuentes left. No one spoke to him as he went through the barroom and out into the night.

“Fucking spic. Do you trust him?” Trafficante asked.

“No. But he'll be useful.”

Fuentes stopped outside the restaurant to light a cigarette and then turned toward Broadway, where he knew he would find a cab.
Back the way it was?
No, it would never be back the way it was, not if he could help it. Colonel Fuentes would be General Fuentes, and that was just the beginning. He went over what they had talked about. Their man taking the shot from a distance. Three hundred yards at night with thousands of people milling around, and Castro moving on the stage. What were the chances of hitting the target? Slim. And then Lopato was supposed to step up and finish it. Typical. The American
chulos
manipulating from a distance, and the Cubans doing the dirty work. Maybe there was a better way.

 

20

Having Alice in the apartment was like living with a big cat. She bathed and washed often and would stand near the tall windows, one hip cocked, running a brush through her hair over and over again while she looked out at the river. She often lay curled on the sofa reading a book or a magazine, and when she turned, she would stretch luxuriously and then resettle with a sigh. She padded around the apartment in bare feet wearing only one of Cassidy's shirts, and if she passed near him she would drape an arm over his shoulder, rub against him, and then move on. He found her spoor everywhere—a stocking hanging on a lamp, panties on the bathroom floor, a half-eaten apple on the arm of a chair. If she ate something that really pleased her, she would let out a low moan, almost like a purr.

She was an active, greedy lover who sought her pleasure openly,
do this, and that, no over here, more, more, oh god, higher, there, there.
She never said no to anything. Do you want to go…? Yes. Do you want to see…? Yes. Would you like to try…? Yes.

And yet sometimes he would catch her looking at him with the impenetrable marble gaze cats have, as if thinking
what is this thing, and what is it doing in my world?

Cassidy came out of the bathroom dressed. He moved quietly so as not to wake Alice. She slept on her side, her hip a round swell under the sheet that covered her to the waist. As he started past, her eyes opened to slits, and she reached out and caught his hand. “Where are you going? Castro?” Her voice was heavy with sleep.

“Yes.”

“Forget him. Come back to bed.”

“I can't.”

“Yes, you can.” She rolled over, and the sheet fell off and showed him what was waiting for him.

“No.”

“Coward.”

“I'll work up the courage by tonight.”

“Tonight? That's a long way off. Who knows? I may have found a new lover by then.”

“I'll arrest him for poaching.”

“Ahh, well, no point then, I guess.” She pulled the sheet up and turned over and burrowed back toward sleep.

*   *   *

Cassidy sat on the porch of Gracie Mansion and read a copy of the
New York Post
he had found on a table. Castro was inside the Mansion for a courtesy meeting with Mayor Robert Wagner. Some of his men walked around outside the house, incongruous in their fatigues, as if transported by magic from some jungle fight to the manicured grounds. They held themselves with the stiffness of men who felt out of place and were determined not to show it. Carlos Ribera came out of the house and took a chair at Cassidy's table. He offered a cigar and lit one for himself when Cassidy refused. Ribera wore linen trousers and a pale gray silk guayabera shirt. He leaned back in the chair and extended his legs to rest his soft leather half boots on the porch railing. He was, as always, a man at ease in his surroundings no matter how foreign.

“I love New York,” Ribera said. “If I did not live in Havana, I would live in New York. Except the winter. I do not like the winter. But six, seven months of the year … There is so much art here, so much, what? Ferment. Things are happening here. You sense it everywhere you go. Something new is about to break loose. Do you feel that? I feel it all the time. I think if I am not here I am going to miss something wonderful.”

“Would you be willing to repeat that on television for the New York Tourist Bureau?”

Ribera laughed. “Sure. Why not?” He looked out at the men in fatigues on the lawn. One of them was doing a handstand while his friends applauded. “Who would have believed this six months ago? Eh? Fidel Castro meets with the Mayor of New York City. Six months ago there was every chance that he would be dead in the mountains, but now,
Cuba Libre
finally.” He looked over at Cassidy. “What? What?”

Cassidy pushed the newspaper across the table. It was folded open to the story he had been reading. Ribera picked it up and started to read. His face stiffened. He looked at Cassidy, glanced at the paper again, and then put it down on the table and pushed it away, dismissing it. The banner headline read
EXECUTIONS IN HAVANA.
“So?” he said.

“Funny way to start a democracy,” Cassidy said. “Fifteen-minute trials and then out to the wall.”

“These men put many people in front of the same wall.”

“And you hated them for it.”

Ribera took that like a punch, and then shook his head as if to clear it. “Every historic change is messy. And Castro offered people the choice. A million people came out in Havana to hear him, and when he asked if they should continue with the revolutionary tribunals and the executions, do you know what the people yelled? They yelled ‘
Si!'
A million voices cried, yes. That is democracy.”

“Jesus, Carlos. Come on.” He could see the anger rising in Ribera.

“Who are you to criticize? The United States of America, the beacon of democracy and freedom? Unless you are a Negro, or a
bracero
who has come to pick your vegetables, or someone who joined a group that is now called Communist. You prop up dictators like Batista because it makes you money. You get rid of heads of state you don't like, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, why? Because they were socialists. But they were elected by their people and thrown out by your CIA. Democracy. Freedom. America.” He stood and leaned over the table and poked a finger at Cassidy. “We will be better than you. We will show you how democracy works.” He threw his cigar out into the lawn and stalked away.

Ribera's anger had the heat of a man who had been betrayed and could not admit it.

Orso came up the steps to the porch. He gestured at the disappearing Ribera. “What was all that about?”

“I suggested that standing a few hundred people up against the wall wasn't the ideal start to democracy.”

“I don't know. You shoot us; we shoot you. Seems democratic to me. You shoot us but we don't get to shoot you, now that's undemocratic.”

“I'm glad we've had this conversation,” Cassidy said. “It's cleared up a lot of my confusion.”

“Bonner and Newly just got here to relieve us. Let's get out of here.”

“Give me a minute.”

Cassidy looked around for Ribera. He wanted to make it right, but the big man had disappeared.

*   *   *

Cassidy and Orso picked up an unmarked car at the police garage and drove to Queens where the late Casey Allen had lived before someone shot him and left him in Central Park. The car was a 1956 Ford lugging eighty-six thousand hard miles. The worn shocks transmitted every bump and pothole to the spine. There was a lateral crack across the top of the windshield. The passenger seat sagged, tilting Cassidy against the door, and the perp seat in back smelled of vomit and disinfectant. Nothing but the best for New York's finest.

Casey Allen lived on 145th Street, a blue-collar neighborhood of single-family houses off the main drag of Jamaica Avenue. The Allen house was a two-story wooden building halfway down the block whose first-floor exterior walls were covered with vinyl sheets patterned as bricks. Orso found a parking place between a three-year-old Studebaker and a Nash Rambler, and they got out and walked back to the house. Cassidy rang the doorbell. They waited under the shade of an aluminum awning painted to match the dark red of the concrete walk. “The old biddy up the way is giving us the eyeball,” Orso said. A woman at a house two doors down turned away and went back to trimming bushes in her front yard when Cassidy looked over at her. A moment later the front door opened a foot and a woman looked out at them through the gap.

“Yeah?” She was a good-looking woman in her late twenties. She had a fierce, strong-boned face with dark eyes deep set under heavy, black eyebrows. Her thick, dark hair was barely controlled in a ponytail by a strip of yellow cloth. She held a feather duster in one hand and wore a yellow rayon blouse with a round collar and tight, dark green Capri pants that showed off her narrow waist and good legs, and matching green sandals with high wedge soles. “Whatever it is I don't want it.”

“Mrs. Allen?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“My name's Cassidy. I'm a detective with the New York Police Department.”

Her fear was almost instant. “Oh, no. Oh, shit. Is it about Casey? What happened to him? Is he all right?” One hand flew to her throat in a gesture of panic, and she dropped the feather duster.

“May we come in?”

She stepped back. Her eyes were wide. Cassidy and Orso stepped into the narrow front hall, and Orso closed the door.

“Is he all right? Tell me he's all right.”

“Mrs. Allen, is this your husband?” Cassidy showed her the photograph of Casey Allen.

She stared at it and then looked up, stricken. “Yes. What's wrong with him? He's dead, isn't he? He's dead.” She crumpled the photograph and slammed her clenched fists against her temples and howled like an animal and then turned and stumbled away.

Cassidy started after her as Orso said, “I'll go get her some water,” and went down the hall in search of the kitchen. Cassidy found her in the living room, a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot box dominated by a large mahogany-cased television facing two Barcaloungers, clues to how the Allens spent their evenings. Sliding pocket doors were open to a small dining room with a Formica-topped table and four chairs. Mrs. Allen was curled on the living room sofa, her howls of anguish somewhat muffled by the back cushions where she had buried her head. Cassidy crouched by her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Allen…” She flailed backward blindly and hit his arm, and he gave up and backed away.

Orso came in with a glass of water. Cassidy gave him a look and a shrug.
What do you do with a hysterical woman?
Orso went to the sofa and crouched down by her head and began to talk to her softly in Italian. After a while she calmed. When she sat up, her eyes were swollen and her face was puffy and raw. She took the glass from Orso and drank some of it, and gave it back to him and sighed heavily. Orso nodded to Cassidy. Cassidy sat close to her on the narrow coffee table in front of the sofa, knee to knee, reducing the space between them to intimacy. “Mrs. Allen, what's your first name?”

“Theresa,” she said dully.

“Theresa, tell us about Casey. When did you see him last?”

“I don't know.”

“Think back. Was it last week? The week before?”

“I don't know. The week before, I guess.”

“Do you remember what day?”

She took the glass out of Orso's hand and drank some more, and then put it on the table and turned to look at Cassidy. Her dark eyes were glazed with tears and impenetrable. “Thursday, I guess. Thursday night, because we like to watch
The Untouchables,
and then he went to bed, 'cause he had to get up early. I watched the news, and then did the dishes. He was already asleep when I went up, and then he was gone in the morning before I got up.”

“Do you know where he was going on Friday?”

“He had work in the city. He was doing renovations for some rich people over there near Central Park, tearing down a wall and building, like, a dressing room for the woman or something.”

“What'd you do when he didn't come home that evening?”

“What'd I do? I went nuts. He calls if he's going to be late. I called the place where he was working, but there was no one there, just one of those answering things you can talk into. I tried the next day. Same thing. I called the hospitals. I went down to the police station, but, like, that was a waste of time. They patted me on the head and told me to go home, he'll show up. You know what they said? They said
sometimes men roam.
What the hell does that mean?” She gulped air. “What happened to him?”

“Someone shot him.”

She wailed and put her head down on her knees. Cassidy reached over and patted her on the back to comfort her. “Theresa, did he have any enemies?”

“No.” Head down, muffled.