White Shadow (26 page)

She had killed.

She sat for several moments in the dark, the dawn an hour away, with the windows to the motor court cabin open. She clicked on a table lamp and flipped through the leather-bound book, reading in English the names and places. She noted the numbers and addresses and knew she would stay at the Giant’s Camp only for as long as it would take to make enough money to return to Cuba. She did not know how such things would work when she got there, but she trusted few people with this, and they would hide her and take care of her and this beaten leather ledger with its strange inscriptions and sayings and odd numbers and dates. It was the key to everything for Him and the rest of the Moncadistas.

She washed her hair that morning in the porcelain sink of the cabin with a bar of small soap and walked three miles in her broken, unlaced boots back to the gas station to use the phone so as not to disturb the Half Woman and the Giant, who had now become just Jeanie and Al. She found the phone booth and inserted the dime and called back to Ybor City for Muriel.

“Do not call me here,” she said, after coming to the phone at the cigar factory.

“The letter,” Lucrezia said. “Has it come?”

There was a pause and the crackling sound of space and dead air and finally a yes.

“What did it say?” she asked.

“I did not read it.”

“Muriel?”

“He promises to come if they let him go. And you will be happy about that. But you will die for that and for the men who you killed.”

“They killed my father and they would’ve killed me.”

“They did not kill your father. Soldiers killed your father.” Lucrezia did not argue the small point, because she knew who had killed her father and that man was stabbed in the chest in the suite of the Nacional by a poor girl in her confirmation dress, and she had little time to argue out petty differences with Muriel.

“You must get word—”

“I am not a part of this. Johnny Rivera came to see me at the Centro, and he knows what you have and wants to find you very badly.”

“What did he say?”

“He knows.”

“You must tell your father about the letter,” Lucrezia said.

“My father does not want that man to come here or to speak. He refuses him entry to the Centro Asturiano.”

“Then the Club Cubano.”

“Not there, either.”

Muriel changed from English to Spanish, and spoke in a quiet whisper, saying:
“Ha matado en Cuba y usted ha matado en nuestro hogar. Violencia es su manera y no queremos mas muerte. Rivera es un hombre violento y me hallara de nuevo si no le puede hallar.”

The line went dead, and Lucrezia emerged from the phone booth and began her walk back to the Giant’s Camp in her thin dress and flopping shoes as the hard yellow light broke over the bay and filtered through the mangroves and over the dead, hard bodies of the cockroach crabs that the Giant would sometimes shoot with a rifle that looked like a toy in his huge hands. When she returned to the motor court, the back door to the white clapboard restaurant was open, and she found Jeanie atop a bar stool, which seemed to become her legs, making biscuits and cutting them into squares with a tiny knife. She smiled at Lucrezia as she put on a dirty white apron and began to place the biscuits into the oven and open tins of coffee to boil for the truckers who made their way from the phosphate plants down the road and the old carnies who came in to read the paper and stay for hours to talk to Al or Jeanie about the old days out on the road. There was the Alligator Man and his wife, the Monkey Woman, who liked biscuits and gravy with ham. And the man, Melvin “the Human Blockhead,” who always had a joke and could perform magic tricks for the curious children who found their way to the camp in the morning shoeless and looking for food.

Jeanie would feed them out of the back door as if they were stray animals, and she would never talk about her acts of kindness later. And that, Lucrezia thought as she poured soap from a box into the large washbasin, seemed such a simple, decent thing to her that she did not understand how others would turn their backs.

He would be free from prison soon. Batista had no stomach or strength for martyrs.

Soon He would come to Ybor City, and He would speak and they would start a revolution from the numbers in the old leather ledger with the odd drawings and names. She thought about the old bent pictures tucked away in its pages—photographs of a young man in a white hat and suit and a woman with bobbed black hair in a short dress from many years ago—and wondered who’d they been. The pictures creased and rubbed from many nights of staring by an oil lamp.

She thought back to Cuba, too, and the military man she’d killed and the men who’d come to Ybor because of him. And as the old food melted off the plates and into the sink, Lucrezia wondered if there would be others who Batista would send.

But mostly she feared Johnny Rivera.

Tonight, she would sit alone again and pray that he would never lay eyes on her again, because she now had the old gambler’s book, and a man like Rivera would never leave a thing like that undone.

GEORGE RAFT and Santo Trafficante sat in the back of the ’55 Cadillac—a light orange Series 62 Coupe de Ville with whitewalls and white cab top—with Jimmy Longo at the wheel as they darted through the maze of Havana streets toward the Prado and its long tree-lined boulevard. At the sidewalk cafés and bars beneath heavy, Moorish-looking buildings painted tropical blue-greens and faded pinks, waiters served bottles of Hatuey beer and cold daiquiris to pretty women in wide-brimmed hats and dark-skinned men in white suits who held cigars and talked about the weather.

The day was a perfect seventy degrees, no clouds, just that cobalt blue over the bay, lighter than the Caribbean water. The air was tinged with salt and cigars. But Santo asked Longo to keep the windows closed tight and the new air conditioner on high so he could only smell the fresh leather of his powder-blue-and-orange leather seats and Raft’s cologne and hair oil. Raft was smoking, but his lips didn’t touch the cigarette, his fingers just holding it for the comfort. The long row of perfect, neatly trimmed trees whizzed by the window while he pointed with his free hand at an imaginary blueprint of the Capri and how it would best anything they had in the old club, the Sans Souci.

“No matter what we do to that place, Santo, it will always have the black eye.”

Santo hated hearing about old rigged Razzle Dazzle that left the casinos empty before Batista came back and brought Lansky to run things straight.

In the bright afternoon light, the age had begun to show on Raft. He still had the manners and the English suits and the Hollywood smile, but the black hair was much more gray and there were lines in his face that made him more weathered and less the matinee idol he still wanted people to believe he was. He only spoke of money and didn’t seem to have respect for life or Havana or, least of all, for the picture business. He just wanted to get back on top again in movies, or in the casino business, or anything that he could.

“Batista wants to meet with you before you leave. He called me and wants you to come to the palace.”

“For what?” Santo asked. “My plane leaves in an hour. Jesus. What the hell does he want now?”

“He wants you to put at least a million into a hotel, and he’ll match your money.”

“I know that.”

Raft lowered his eyes and smiled. “You’ll be able to run the Capri tax-free for ten years and bring in whatever you want with wheels and tables and slots and furniture or whatever. He won’t tax you a dime.”

Santo nodded.

The Cadillac was at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside, and Raft was cold, but Trafficante seemed right at home, turning away from the movie star and nodding to himself, thinking about all the options. He took off his glasses, cleaned them with a hankie, and slipped them back on.

“I need to talk to Meyer.”

“You know what he’ll say. Run with it.”

“Sure,” Santo said. “People who give favors expect favors.”

“Doesn’t El Presidente expect favors already?”

“Of course. But I’d rather keep most of the money that I make.”

“You know in ’42, Jack Warner owed me seventy-five thousand dollars, but I was so tired of the son of a bitch and his lousy company I paid him ten thousand dollars to tear up my contract.”

Santo turned back to him as Jimmy Longo stared back into the seat through the rearview mirror, and gave his eyebrows an up-and-down. Longo was wearing a bow tie and a seersucker suit, the starched collar on his shirt so tight it brought a high color into his face.

“The Sans Souci is a great club,” Raft said in that gravelly, smoky voice. “It really is, with the dancers and the voodoo and magic and all that, but you need to show the world something with the Capri.”

“We’ll talk about it when I get back,” Santo said.

“I just want to make sure you’re coming back.”

“It’s just a court appearance,” Santo said. “My lawyer says I need to be there and face the judge to take off some heat. But I got everything under control.”

“What if you don’t?”

Santo shrugged. “Then I guess I’m just coming back earlier.”

Raft leaned back into the big bench seat, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. “How come you’re being so cool now? Last week you couldn’t sleep and were spitting up blood. Now you’re drinking mojitos and laughing. I even heard you and Jimmy listening to music.”

“Things change.”

They turned out onto the Malecón, and drove through big thick sprays of salt water kicking up from the seawall, another surf crashing into the old wall and delivering a hard blow. Santo took a breath and shrugged.

“Like what?”

“Like sometimes the Feds are holding a flush with a big shit-eating grin on their faces and then,
poof,
it gets taken away and they’re left holding squat.”

JAKE’S SILVER COACH DINER was a beautiful stainless steel capsule, about a block over from the
Times,
filled with bacon smoke and the sound of frying eggs and Rosemary Clooney on the jukebox. On any day, you’d find Jake Maloof, the hardened Greek that he was, sitting on a stool by his heavy metal cash register reading the latest stock reports in the
Wall Street Journal
and smoking a cigar. While his daughter waited tables and his son-in-law cracked jokes or told stories about being on a dive-bomber in the Pacific, you could eat a fifty-cent breakfast at the counter.

I’d keep my straw hat at my elbow and take my time with the coffee and the toast after eating up the bacon and eggs. If I stayed long enough, I’d hear Johnny say—just as sure as the ticking of a clock—“Every day is a holiday at the
Times,
ain’t it, Turner?”

And I’d look at my watch and know it was time to get back to the newsroom before Hampton Dunn jumped my ass.

According to the
Trib,
there had been a child drowning, a liquor store robbery, and two men stabbed over in Ybor City. Maybe I’d follow the stabbings over in Ybor. Maybe there’d be something new on Charlie Wall.

I made a few mental notes and listened to Johnny arguing with his wife back in the kitchen among the clanging skillets and jangling of silverware, and I heard Jake grunting and laughing about some stock that he had known was going to plummet and had.

I was about to get up.

But then Baby Joe Diez walked into the diner, the bell jingling over the door, and sat at the counter, not even glancing at me as he ordered a cup of coffee.

I finished my cup down to those last little microscopic grounds in the bottom and looked over at him.

Baby Joe sat erect at the counter in a lightweight pin-striped suit and brilliant red tie. His hair had been oiled and recently cut, and he pulled out a hankie from his coat pocket and wiped the morning sweat from his neck. No matter his reputation or age, at first glance Baby Joe always looked like a kid playing dress-up, with his small body and small hands. But the face and the eyes showed a much older man, maybe even older than he really was. And while I waited to get a refill on my cup as soon as Jake’s daughter quit her tirade, Baby Joe looked over at me with those slow, killer eyes—no smile—and then back at the kitchen.