by Jose Latour
Shortly before 6 P.M., Contreras leisurely came up the ramp, peering at parked cars to his right and left. He spotted the De Soto, casually looked over his shoulder, approached the left rear door, pulled the handle, and got in.
“Good evening, Mr. Naguib.”
Faithful to his role of a rich, antiquated tobacco grower, Contreras had on a well-worn, navy-blue gabardine suit over a starched white dress shirt, and a red tie. The arabesques on the toecap and vamp of his black-and-white thousand-eye shoes were filled with a chalky paste. A lock of hair fell onto his forehead when he removed his hat.
“Good evening, Contreras. How’s it going?”
“As planned. We’re in suite 406. The maid cleans when we’re in. We only go out at night, and only to the casino.” Contreras made a short pause. “My man won around thirteen hundred last night.”
Naguib chortled before lighting a cigarette. Contreras accepted the Zippo’s flame and lit a La Corona, blew smoke out, then rolled down the window a few inches.
“Your … man, as you say—is he good at this polio act?”
“He’s doing fine so far.”
“How about the rest of the team?”
“They’re ready. I talked to them all over the phone a while ago.”
Naguib nodded his approval. “Did your scout notice anything unusual last Saturday?”
Contreras immediately shook his head, looking at the back of the front seat, then raised his left hand to ask for a few moments. “Yes, he did. There’s a new hall supervisor. I talked to him Sunday night; name’s Grouse. I suppose first string is on vacation or something.”
“Probably. Need any money?”
“No. I was falling behind a little, but that piece of blind luck last night solved the problem.”
“Is there anything on your mind?”
Contreras thought it wise to seize the opportunity. Naguib had promised to do the unthinkable.
“You talked to Grava?”
“I did. He’ll keep things quiet.”
The ex-con hoped for something more explicit. “Look at it my way,” he began. “Even if the papers don’t print a word, even if Lansky instructs Di Constanzo not to call the police, somehow this will leak out, ’cause it’s too big a hit and Grava has stooges all over town. He’ll get descriptions from casino and hotel staff, maybe have them take a look at a few mug shots, and being the kind of sonafabitch he is, he’s gonna come after us no matter what to grab as much silver for himself as possible.”
“And you’ve taken precautions according to this scenario.”
“You bet.”
“Well done,” the Lebanese said, then took a final drag from his cigarette and crushed the butt on the ashtray in the back of the front seat. “But listen: After you do the job, a couple of days later, I’ll talk to Grava again. I’ll tell him why it was done and make clear that you and your men worked for a percentage. When he learns who ordered it, he’ll take it easy. This guy knows what’s best for him. If to this you add your own precautions, I believe you can feel pretty safe.”
“Amen,” Contreras said, sounding convinced, though he wasn’t.
“We’ll meet again on the ninth if the Series ends tomorrow, the tenth if it goes to Thursday.”
The Cuban nodded. “At the Château, ten P.M.”
“Be careful during the getaway. No traffic violations. A casual clash with a police cruiser is the only real danger I can foresee.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“No.”
Contreras dragged on his cigarette and threw the butt out. “Good evening, then.”
“Good evening, Ox. And good luck.”
Contreras released the door handle and turned to look at Naguib. “First time you call me that.”
The Lebanese nodded, with something resembling curiosity seeping from his eyes. “We’ve been together in this for three months now. We could become friends. So … why Ox?”
“First thing I stole. See you soon.”
…
The two-story wooden country house looked like a frustrated project in progressive decay. Behind the padlocked Cyclone-fence gateway entrance to the four-thousand-square-yard lot, the driveway opened into a small parking area. Four steps led to the front door and a verandah that went around the left side of the residence. The ground floor consisted of a small foyer, a spacious living room, a dining room, a guest room with a small bathroom, the kitchen, and four closets. A narrow, creaky staircase led from the foyer to the top floor’s three bedrooms and bigger bathroom. Thirty yards behind the house, a smaller wooden structure served as garage at ground level, servants’ quarters above. Fruit trees were scattered throughout a neglected garden choking on dead leaves and dry twigs.
Crawling between the plain wood strip flooring and the supporting boards, amongst coffers, beams, moldings, and paneling, the house lodged colonies of mice, cockroaches, scorpions, spiders, and ants, all mutant survivors of ineffectual fumigation. In the last five years this fauna had resoundingly defeated the three different families that had leased the place looking for a retreat in the outskirts, yet close enough to Havana via the two-lane Calabazar Highway.
The sequestered chalet needed two coats of paint outside and one inside, its roof leaked in places, and the rent was too high, but when Fermín Rodríguez signed the lease, he had other considerations on his mind. The nearest neighbor was roughly a block away. The bindweed-covered wire fence offered partial protection from peeping strangers. A closed exit at the back of the lot could become an escape route to wasteland. As the owner showed him around the place, Fermín fed him a load of bullshit. The house would become the shop, the garage the warehouse, for the publicity products made by his company, a burgeoning new firm that had outgrown the room it presently rented in the capital. It would manufacture decals and print leaflets for the moment, then progress to billboards, neon signs, and TV spots in a few months.
Valentín Rancaño, scout and gambling expert, and Melchor Loredo, getaway driver, replayed their Monday and Tuesday act on Wednesday, October 8. They arrived by bus dressed in blue mechanics’ coveralls, sipped espresso at a small cafeteria three blocks away, and, jabbering on about the World Series, headed for the house a little before 8 A.M. At 8:14 Fermín showed up in a dilapidated 1950 Ford pickup, opened the padlock, removed the chain. He left the vehicle in the parking area and went inside, followed by his assumed hired hands. They opened the sash windows, turned on the lights, a radio, and the water pump. Next all three busied themselves unloading mostly empty cardboard boxes from the pickup, shouting orders, dumping garbage, and banging on loose boards, but to kill time until 4 P.M. it became almost imperative to sit on the floor with a deck of cards and reminisce about their younger years or daydream about what the future had in store for each of them.
“If I come out with ten or fifteen thousand, I’d build a house in Párraga or Mantilla and open a three-cent espresso stand,” Loredo said, introducing the subject.
“And if you come out with thirty or forty thou?” Fermín wanted to know.
“Don’t talk shit, Gallego. That’s just Ox’s pep talk.”
“Just for the heck of it, suppose you come out with that much,” the bald man insisted.
Loredo’s stare eloped through an open window and came to rest on the lilac and green of a camellia shrub. He had been hoping for a turnaround since childhood. Born thirty-two years earlier in Caimanera, Oriente, the son of a mulatto prostitute and an unknown American sailor, he had been raised by his black grandmother in Santiago de Cuba on the monthly remittance his mother regularly sent until she was killed by a drunken Marine who accidentally shot her in the head. Loredo’s education ended in fifth grade. At twelve he peddled candies on the streets. At fifteen he found himself seduced by a white high-society lady while employed as her houseboy. At seventeen he went to prison on a rape charge after the husband caught them in the act.
Loredo moved to Havana in 1947, learned to drive while washing and parking cars in a
garage, and a year later stole his first heap, a ’34 Chevy sold to a fence for twenty pesos. From 1952 to 1954 he served a second prison term at the Isla de Pinos penitentiary on account of a new security device that locked the steering wheel of ’48 Lincolns. In 1955 he found love with a strikingly beautiful, affectionate, good-natured black woman. Now Loredo longed to raise his two sons in a somewhat different way.
“Compadre, if I got that much, I’d build a four-unit apartment building and open a bar and grill.”
“I’d open a gambling joint,” Rancaño said unasked. “I’ve spotted a vacant loft above a bar on Avenida del Puerto that’s out of this world. Around there people play craps in the street, poker games in their homes. This retired hooker has bingo in the dining room of a tiny apartment and she’s making thirty, forty bucks a day. With a couple of thousand I’ll buy a second-hand wheel, furniture …”
Rancaño presented a well-argued case for opening a cheap gambling joint in 1958 Havana. He was born in Rodas in the province of Las Villas, where his father had felt relieved of further paternal duties after securing him a job as clerk in the town’s general store. He lived a rebellious childhood, disregarding both his mother’s emotional pleas and the punishments meted out by his old man. Valentín finally drained the sweet woman’s kindness when, at puberty, he tried to find daily relief for his insatiable sexual voracity among her sows and hens.
During his first year in the store, Rancaño kept himself busy learning the trade: its inexhaustible diversity of things and gadgets, assortments and prices, orders and shipments. But at fifteen, a card-playing barber introduced him to games of chance and the teenager found his reason to live. The hormonal imbalance that covered his cheeks with a severe acne made him retreat into himself and jerk off madly. Terrified by the lack of opportunities in the rural backwaters, in 1946 Rancaño stole twenty-five pesos from the general store’s cash register and fled to Havana. His father refunded the owner; no charges were pressed.
In the Cuban capital he had brief stints as a poolroom attendant, numbers collector, and apprentice mechanic of vending machines before becoming a seven-and-a-half dealer at a clandestine gambling hall in the town of Bauta. One evening police raided the place and he was busted, booked, and eventually incarcerated for illicit gambling. A very experienced gambler serving a life term for strangling his wife taught him a whole bag of tricks, but after his release his criminal record prevented him from getting a job at a casino and he took to cleaning suckers out in flying joints set up on a park bench or in the back room of a bodega. A dice specialist, Rancaño owned eleven loaded pairs, seven which had been shaved down, six with duplicated faces and countless good ones, perfect and imperfect, made from cellulose or other plastic, transparent or opaque, with red or black flush spots. Rancaño mastered thirteen dice games, from the plebeian craps to the barbooth played in the Middle East.
“I’ll keep the police off my back with twenty or thirty pesos each day. I’ll start with three dealers and a guard. In two or three years I’ll be ‘Señor Rancaño’ in Havana, trading in my Cadillac each September, with broads and white drill suits by the dozen. How’s that for starters?”
“Sounds all right,” Loredo said diplomatically. His poor results on bets made him loathe all sorts of wagers.
“That’s a good area,” said Fermín, plucking the cigar out of his mouth. “Stevedores, truck drivers, and Customs people make good money. Sailors come ashore loaded too. Your joint might come off okay. Hey, I’m hungry, how about you two?”
At noon on Monday, a lousy chicken with rice at a distant greasy spoon had prompted Fermín to suggest buying some kitchenware and provisions. It would make them look more on the up-and-up, he had argued—and lunch decently as well. The idea seemed amusing to Loredo. On Tuesday, Rancaño had spoiled the rice, and that Wednesday he was sentenced, two votes against one, to do the dishes and scour the saucepans. Lunch consisted of the ever-present rice cooked by Loredo, two cans of red beans heated bain-marie in a pan of water by Fermín, one pork sausage each, crackers, and coffee. Afterward they turned off the radio and lay back on the floor to take a nap over old newspapers, folded cardboard boxes serving as pillows. By 12:25 P.M., Fermín’s soft snoring became the only sound in the dining room.
Loredo awoke at 1:15, lit a cigarette, and smoked distractedly for a couple of minutes. Then he turned on the radio and tuned in to Circuito Nacional Cubano. To his surprise, over heavy static a voice was emotionally describing plays of the sixth World Series game from County Stadium, Milwaukee. He glanced sharply at his watch.
“Hey, guys, wake up, the game’s on,” he bellowed, turning up the volume.
Fermín supported himself on his right elbow and glanced at his watch. “It can’t be,” he mumbled.
Nearly a minute elapsed before the commentator explained that the game had started at 12:30 due to a threat of rain that might still force a cancellation. It was drizzling in Milwaukee, the humidity was 95 percent, and wind speed had reached fifteen miles an hour. A quick recap of the action let them know that the Braves led 2–1 in the top of the fourth. Hank Bauer had slugged a home run in the first inning, his fourth in the Series, tying a record held jointly by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Duke Snider. In the bottom of the first the Braves had scored on a Hank Aaron single to left field with Schoendienst on second. In the second inning, Warren Spahn had hit a single to center that brought Covington home.
Fermín asked for an act and they went out pretending to be busy. Back inside, Loredo brewed fresh espresso as the others used the toilet. Finally, all three sat on the dining room floor to follow the rest of the game.
His attention frequently wandering to the unkempt garden or the peeling paint on the walls, Fermín realized that his once fervent rooting for the Yankees had faded into nonchalance. He wondered whether in the future, living a new life that would have been so influenced by baseball, he would ever feel his old passion for the game. The bald man lit a fresh cigar and listened as his team tied the game in the top of the sixth, when Mantle singled over Logan’s outstretched glove, Howard lined a hit to center, Bruton fumbled the ball for an error and Mantle took third. Berra flied to Bruton in deep center, scoring the runner on the sacrifice fly.
The bald man was making plans too, both overt and covert. Number one among the former was setting up an elegant, disease-free, respectable brothel where drugs, 8mm porno films, and multiple sex would be taboo, for of late he had become a man of archaic immorality. Prominent among the latter was ordering ten pairs of special Italian shoes, at fifty dollars each, to add a couple of inches to his height.
Shortness was his Achilles’ heel. It made him feel lessened as a human being, and in his childhood any observation regarding his stature had started fierce fistfights that had to be broken up by adults. Son of a housemaid from Murcia, Spain, and a Majorcan dry cleaner from Ibiza who died of TB in 1924, Fermín had got an education on a scholarship granted by the Brothers of the Virgin Mary and graduated as a bookkeeper in 1934. Firmly inserted by his widowed mother in the lower echelons of Havana’s Spanish colony, he had landed a job as collector of monthly fees at the Centro Asturiano social club and got to know the city like the back of his hand. Introverted and analytic, Fermín had realized that hard work meant nothing better than a meager livelihood for most club members. For years he had considered business opportunities, none of which materialized because of his lack of capital. By his mid-twenties, the short man had left behind the set of values and traditions his mother and the priests had carefully planted.
At twenty-four, strongly influenced by the wave of defeated Spanish Republicans arriving in Cuba in search of a future, Fermín had embraced, with equal passion, anarchism and a tall, slim whore. The young woman, who worked the Colón district, fell for the burning desire, rosy skin, and green eyes of her most devoted client. The four-inch height gap had aroused local glee, but Fermín fought his corner well and reached the position of Gloria Street’s most respected amateur pimp. He kept his job
at the Centro Asturiano, though, for the five years it took him to master the prostitution business.
By the time World War II was about to end, Fermín had two too-tall women working for him and had befriended other prostitutes, who had heard he didn’t beat his ladies, took care of everything they needed, and let them keep a fair percentage of the fruits of their labor. He had been giving serious consideration to opening a brothel of his own when one night he had to stab a husky boxer in the liver. The fighter had been kicking the living shit out of him and calling him names: “Crap Dwarf” had made Fermín climb the wall with anger. Two months later he was sentenced to eight years for manslaughter.
In prison he lost his hair and found in Contreras the close friend he had never had. Both men took Heller under their wings when the young and inexperienced former law student arrived in the Presidio Modelo to serve two years for complicity in a payroll holdup. With the know-how of the hardened criminal, plus his wit and cynicism, Contreras became the indisputable leader of the threesome. Fermín had raw courage, imagination, and a fanatic’s determination; Heller possessed the smoothness of good mediators, an above-average education, and a wealth of joy that made his two friends laugh with a frequency that was amazing, given the circumstances. Freed years apart, they reassembled in Havana and pulled off small swindles, burglaries and holdups as they waited for The Job—which was now within their reach.
The baseball game remained tied during the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings. Fermín read in the newspaper about Pius XII’s brain clot, the shellings of Quemoy and Matsu, the opening of a Spanish film by Sarita Montiel, and Elvis Presley’s arrival in Germany for his obligatory Army stint.
The game recaptured everyone’s attention in the top of the tenth, when Gil McDougald, the New Yorkers’ second baseman, banged Spahn’s second pitch over the left field fence for a home run. Hank Bauer flied deep to Bruton and Mathews threw out Mantle, but then Elston Howard and Yogi Berra singled to right. With runners on first and third, Fred Haney replaced Spahn with Don McMahon and Skowron singled to right, scoring Howard. After Ryne Duren struck out, Loredo sighed and cut a sideways look at Fermín.
