LaBrava

by Elmore Leonard

  They went into the bedroom and undressed without a word to make love in dimmed silence, to make love as soon as they were in bed and she brought him between her legs, Joe LaBrava believing this was unbelievable. Look at him. He was making love to Jean Shaw, he was honest-to-God making love to Jean Shaw in real life. He didn’t want to be watching, he wanted to be overwhelmed by it, by Jean Shaw, making love to her, but he didn’t want to just do it either, he wanted the overwhelming feeling of it to take hold and carry them away. But her eyes were closed and maybe she was just doing it, doing it with him, moving with him, but she could be doing it without him because he didn’t know where she was with her eyes closed so tight. He wanted to see her eyes and he wanted her to see him . . . so close to her face, her hair, her skin and not a blemish, not a trace of a tiny scar . . . He had to stop thinking if he was going to be overwhelmed. He had to let himself be overwhelmed . . .

  It wasn’t something he would tell anyone. He would never do that. Though it seemed like the kind of thing you might tell a stranger on a train without naming names. On a train? Come on. He was making an old-time movie out of it looking for a way to tell it. Or maybe write it in a diary. Though he could never imagine, under any circumstances, even in solitary confinement, writing or talking to himself.

  No, he would never be able to tell anyone there was more to making love to a movie star than just . . . making love. Or, maybe he should qualify it. Say, making love to a movie star the first time . . . there was more to it than just making love. The idea of it, the anticipation, the realization, was more overwhelming than the doing of it. Although he could not say that would be true of all movie stars.

  What he had almost said to her when she said, “What do you see when you look at me?” was:

  “The first woman I ever fell in love with, when I was twelve years old.”

  But the mood, something, had saved him from maybe getting pushed out the window. He was able to move through the next steps letting heavy breathing bring them along, into the bedroom to the act itself. But you see, with all the anticipation, thinking back twenty-five years to the first time you saw her and were knocked out by her, finally when you’re there and it’s happening, it’s almost impossible to quit thinking about how great it’s going to be, how unbelievable, and do it without watching yourself doing it.

  The movie star smoked a cigarette after. In bed. She actually smoked a cigarette. He went in the kitchen, fixed a couple of light Scotches and brought them back. The movie star acted a little like a kitten. She seemed much younger with her clothes off, not at all self-conscious. She gave him those secret looks, sly smiles that were familiar. (But did she have secrets? Now?) She asked him how he would photograph her. He said he’d like to think about it.

  What he thought about though, what he was most aware of, was a feeling. It was not unlike the way he felt and wondered about things when he was looking at his photographs.

  He felt—lying in bed with Jean Shaw, after—relief. There, that was done.

  And wondered if he had learned anything about illusions, since that time when he was twelve years old and first fell in love.

  There were other feelings he had that he would save and look at later. All things considered, he felt pretty good. The movie star was a regular person. Underneath it all, she was. Except that she was never a regular person for very long.

  She said, “You’re good for me, Joe. Do you know that?”

  Familiar. But he didn’t know the next line, what he was supposed to say, and the words that came to mind were dumb. So he smiled a tired smile and patted her thigh, twice, and left his hand there.

  She said, “I have a feeling you’re the best thing that could happen to me, Joe.”

  Another one, so familiar. He sipped his Scotch. He looked at the ceiling and a scene from Deadfall, early in the picture, began to play in his mind. Jean Shaw saying to Robert Mitchum, “I have a feeling you’re the best thing that could happen to me . . . Steve.”

  And Robert Mitchum, giving her that sleepy look, said . . .

  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?”

  12

  * * *

  HE WAS SMILING before Franny reached the porch with her sack of groceries and saw him, holding the door open.

  She said, “What do you do, just hang out?”

  “I’m locking up.”

  “This early?”

  It
was twenty past seven. He closed the glass door and set the lock, Franny inside now looking around the empty lobby, the last of daylight dull on the terrazzo floor that was like the floor, to LaBrava, of a government building. He turned on the cut glass chandelier and Franny looked up at it, not impressed.

  “The place needs more than that, Joe.”

  “Color? Some paintings?”

  She waited as he turned on lamps and came back. “It needs bodies, warm ones. I’m not knocking the old broads . . .”

  “Bless their hearts,” LaBrava said.

  “Listen,” Franny said, “I’m gonna be an old broad myself someday, if I make it. But we could use a little more life around here. So far we’ve got you and me and the movie star and things haven’t improved that much. Joe, there’s a carton behind the desk with my name on it UPS dropped off. Would you mind grabbing it for me? I’ve got my hands full.” She waited and said, “Let’s see,” when he brought it out and said, “Oh, shit, I was afraid of that. Another case of Bio-Energetic Breast Cream. Apply with a gentle, circular massaging motion to add bounce and resiliency.” Into the elevator and up. “Do you know how much bounce and resiliency it’s gonna add to the dugs around here? Contains collagen and extract of roses, but not nearly enough, I’m afraid, for South Beach bazooms. They’ve served their purpose, we hope. Right?” And down the hall to 204. “Maybe I can sell a couple bottles to your movie star . . . You’re not talking, uh? I saw you having lunch, it looked like you were giving each other bites. When you were in there close, Joe, did you notice any little hairline scars?”

  He said, “That’s not nice,” and was surprised he didn’t feel protective or take offense. He was with Franny and they were old pals.

  “But you looked, didn’t you? Come on in. Don’t lie to me, Joe.” She went to the kitchen and he looked around the room, surprised at its lived-in appearance after only two days. It was all the color that gave the effect. The colors in the unframed canvases on the walls—bold abstract designs in shimmering gold, blues and tans—and the pillows in striking colors and shapes, on the floor and piled on the daybed she used as a sofa. Wicker chairs held stacks of books and magazines. Her voice remained with him as he looked around. “I’m jealous, if you want to know the truth.” The venetian blinds were pulled up, out of the way, the evening blue in the windows faded, pale next to the paintings. “You asked me to lunch, sorta, and I see you over there with your movie star.” There were cartons stenciled SPRING SONG, a portable television. She came out of the kitchen with white wine in stem glasses.