Havana World Series

by Jose Latour

  “Maybe. You let people manipulate you, you’re an asshole,” Lansky opined, wanting to stave off any additional questioning of his judgment. “Now we’ve reasserted that this is our turf and we’re ready to stand up for it. The whole problem boils down to lack of initiative. Bananas and Profaci have the whole Caribbean open to them. Mexico, the Bahamas, Jamaica—there’re a hundred places where they can set up shop. But no, they want to cash in on my turf, benefit from the years I’ve spent here building from scratch. They envy my patience paying off. Fuck them. Cuba is ours.”

  Di Constanzo resented having the gospel foisted upon him. He knew it by heart. However, he kept a respectful silence, eyes on a flowerbed, sidestepping a confrontation.

  “Our people will hear about it,” Lansky elaborated. “And if someone was considering working for the competition, he’ll reconsider. Believe me, Nick, these things have their bright side, too. They strengthen the organization, reassert people. I hate losing a good man, and he was pretty good, but if we’d let him walk, in less than a year Bonanno would’ve opened his first Havana casino.”

  “Meyer, I also need to consult with you on the Series,” Di Constanzo said, to cut the crap.

  “What are the odds today?”

  “Even.”

  “Who’s pitching?”

  “Burdette and Larsen.”

  “How much would a Yankee win set us back?”

  “Almost half a million,” the man from Capri said. “One hundred and ninety-two grand for the Series and nearly three hundred grand for the game. So, I suggest unloading in Miami. We’ve got two and a half hours.”

  “Okay. Call from here. Jacob! Hey, Jacob! Show Nick to the phone, will you?”

  …

  At the forlorn wooden house, inside an old wood-and-tin-plate icebox beneath fifteen pounds of ice bought early in the morning, lay ten juicy sirloin steaks. The kitchen cupboards stored four bottles of red Rioja wine and one of Tres Cepas brandy. But out of superstition, Fermín Rodríguez, Valentín Rancaño, and Melchor Loredo refused to celebrate in advance. Lunch consisted of rice and slices of a six-egg omelet with ham, sausage, fried potatoes, and onions thrown in. Wheel and Meringue agreed they should tune in at twelve as a precaution against an early start, but Gallego had the nerve to take a nap by the babbling radio.

  “This guy’s unbelievably cool,” said Loredo, eyeing the snoozing man.

  “And doesn’t look it,” Rancaño agreed with a nod. “You see this egg-bald, potbellied short guy walking down the streets, you figure him wrong. But brother, he’s got banging balls.”

  Loredo clucked with what sprang to his mind. “Once we went to steal this truck loaded with GE fans,” he gleefully recalled. “We were broke, man, didn’t have a penny in our pockets, no irons, nothing, and Gallego says to me, ‘You’ll see, we’re gonna make a thousand sticks each with this job.’”

  Rancaño shook his head and grinned. “Always calls the dough ‘sticks.’”

  “It was a six-wheel, ’52 Chevy closed truck. Each time the driver loaded at the Ward Line pier, he used to go fuck a hooker in San Isidro. Can you believe it? He could go earlier, when the truck was empty, but no, the guy always went for pussy after leaving the pier. Big bastard, you know, but Gallego had him well cased and knew he used to stay inside the brothel no less than thirty minutes. Gallego knows everybody in the neighborhood, on account of Liberata having lived there so many years.”

  “Piece of cake.”

  “That’s what we thought. I brought the tools and Gallego had a fourteen-inch-long iron pipe in a rolled-up newspaper. The jerk pulls over, rolls up the window, locks the door, gets into the whorehouse. I worked the door and we got into the cab. I’m doing the wires when the jerk hits the bricks after a couple of minutes. To this day I don’t know if the hooker was sick or out, but he sees us, can’t believe his eyes at first, then screams, ‘You won’t steal my truck, cabrones,’ and pulls out a knife this long.”

  “Coño.”

  “Then Gallego says: ‘Get this started; I’ll take care of him.’ He jumps out, hits the guy on the wrist with the pipe, picks up the knife from the sidewalk, orders him to back off. The guy’s howling in pain, feeling his busted arm with the other hand. Then Gallego goes behind him, stands on the top front step of the whorehouse—there were two, you know, and he had to stand on the second to reach the guy’s neck and put on a stranglehold. The truck wouldn’t start. I must’ve flooded the carburetor—fucking nerves. A crowd had gathered by then. It was eleven in the morning, for God’s sake! Gallego, cool as a penguin, is talking to the truck driver, compadre. I’m seeing his lips move and I ask myself, What the fuck’s Gallego saying to that beast? Then, as if by magic, the engine caught and we took off.”

  Rancaño found himself smiling in amusement. “You ask him what he said to the guy?”

  “You bet. We were celebrating that same evening—made fifteen hundred each—and I asked him, ‘Gallego, what the fuck were you saying to the sonofabitch?’ Says he told him not to be an asshole, that Casa Giralt was covered by insurance but that no surgeon would be able to sew his head back in place if he moved. And the guy froze like a fucking statue.”

  “He’s a bunch of balls.”

  “Listen. Game’s on. Wake him up.”

  …

  Lew Burdette’s first pitch whooshed over home plate at 1:54 P.M. The strike was cheered by 46,367 County Stadium spectators, watched or listened to with anticipation by countless millions all over the world. Except for the second game, each of the previous six had kept people alert to the very end, raising expectations about this final clash to decide baseball’s World Championship.

  The Manhattan Mules had had a thorn in their side since the previous season, when the Braves had won baseball’s supreme prize, leaning, above all, on a staff headed by Warren Spahn, one of the best left-handed pitchers in the sport’s history, and Lew Burdette, spitball and screwball specialist.

  Now, a year later almost to the day, New York fans hoped that Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, both hitting .325 in the first six games, would take matters into their hands. But the fans hadn’t checked all the statistics: The two star players had produced only four of the twenty-five runs scored by their team.

  At least seven men watching the game or listening to the play-by-play description of radio commentators didn’t really care. There were also millions of mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts, millions of wives and perhaps even a few thousand husbands, who would merely put up with the cheers and hullabaloo. But the seven men had a very special reason for their indifference.

  Elias Naguib didn’t begin to understand sport as a social activity. His childhood and adolescence had been so focused on survival, he hadn’t had the time to kick balls or play games. Naguib found boxing and wrestling sensible, given the number of punches and shoves he had landed and accepted in his youth. But it seemed to him that when grown-up men could make a pretty nice living by throwing, hitting, or kicking balls, running after them, and passing them as millions of spectators applauded or booed them, something was very wrong in the Western world. One of the many reasons democracy appeared to be losing the struggle against Communism, the Lebanese concluded. So when in the bottom of the first Schoendienst singled to left, Bruton walked, Torre sacrificed, Aaron walked, and Covington grounded to Skowron, who beat the runner to first as Schoendienst scored and the others advanced, the Lebanese let loose the first of a long series of yawns.

  Contreras displayed his indifference in the top of the second. Berra walked and Howard bunted, but Frank Torre threw wild to Burdette, covering first base, and Berra reached third. “Yesterday it looked as though they’d be snowed out and today, look, the geeks are wearing T-shirts!” said Contreras.

  “The commentator said it was sunny and warm,” Heller explained.

  “Did he?”

  “You were taking a leak.”

  “Oh.”

  Torre scooped up Jerry Lumpe’s bouncer and again made a poor throw to B
urdette covering first. In his usual state of mind, Heller would have unwrapped one of his sarcasms, like “This guy’s Milwaukee’s Norm Siebern,” but he remained silent. With bases full, Skowron grounded to Logan, whose throw to Schoendienst forced Lumpe at second as Berra scored and Howard took third. Then Kubek lined to Covington, Howard scoring after the catch. The game was 2–1 for his favorite team when the former law student opened the newspaper to scan the dog track results.

  Joseph Bonanno amusedly studied his son Salvatore—“Bill” to the rest of the family—as he exulted over the lead. The aspiring don and his wife Rosalie had arrived from Phoenix on the seventh, exhausted by a long Indian summer, to snoop around New York. Eighteen years earlier, Bonanno had bought a mansion in Tucson while looking for the right place to heal Salvatore’s permanent ear suppuration. As a college boy the young man had moved to Phoenix, and he remained there after his marriage to Rosalie Profaci. Cynics had considered the union a calculated, medieval parental arrangement.

  The family had gathered on the back porch of the Hempstead house, facing a 21-inch color TV set. Bonanno sat at center, Fay on his left, and Bill on his right, as Rosalie flipped through the current issue of Life. The heir was overjoyed when the Braves lost an opportunity in the third inning: Del Crandall grounded out to McDougald with bases full and two outs. The don listened to his son opine on Bob Turley’s relieving Don Larsen, nodded with a smile, and for some reason the next thing that popped into his mind was the pregnancy and imminent delivery of his favorite Holstein—Lady Florence—at his Middletown farm. Like Naguib, his attention was focused eleven hours ahead, reducing his lackluster interest in sports to virtually nonexistent.

  Up to the moment that Del Crandall smashed a home run over the left field fence to tie the game in the bottom of the sixth, Fermín Rodríguez, Melchor Loredo, and Valentín Rancaño had engaged in telling stories, making jokes, smoking, gobbling up a can of peaches, and turning the pages of a Carteles magazine. But the tie rekindled a passion born in boyhood, when most destitute Cuban kids swung discarded broomsticks against balls made from rags, and for the last three innings they were hooked.

  In the top of the eighth, Burdette dominated Gil McDougald, who flied to Aaron; then Mickey Mantle was called out on strikes. But Berra doubled off the right field wall and Howard singled to center, scoring the Yankees’ catcher. Andy Carey singled off Mathews’s glove and Howard stopped at second. Burdette was tired after eight innings of pitching, but he also remembered the beating he’d taken during the sixth inning of the fifth game, and that kept him going.

  Bill Skowron brought his .192 batting average to the plate. The first pitch was a called strike, and then came a low curveball. Burdette decided his third pitch ought to be a high fastball. Skowron saw it coming, swung with all he had, and hit a 363-foot home run.

  A thick coat of stunned silence spread over County Stadium and the whole city of Milwaukee. Colossal rejoicing gripped New York. The Yankees held a four-run lead, and the Braves had only two more innings to overcome it.

  Those who cared, from Casey Stengel and Fred Haney to radio listeners in Asia, were seized by a feeling of consummation. To have hoped for a turnaround would have set a new record for wishful thinking, and the Braves deflated.

  In the bottom of the last two innings, Bob Turley faced men going through all the motions expected of confident players arriving in the batter’s box: The hand-rubbing athletes measured their distance from home plate with the bat, then swung it viciously against the air, vainly threatening to hit hard, unreachable liners. But it was just cheap acting. They all knew Milwaukee wouldn’t win the 1958 World Championship, and the whole team anxiously waited for the end to get out of the damn place, take a shower, and guzzle a six-pack.

  Commentators were describing the joy that overwhelmed the New York players after the last out when Fermín Rodríguez turned off the set, stood up, and dusted off the seat of his pants.

  “It’s over, fellows. No rainout, no brawls, nothing. Tonight we’ll light the fire under the can. Be at Las Delicias de Medina by eleven. Now, let’s close the windows.”

  Bonanno glowered over Bill’s euphoria. His son looked childish celebrating so expansively—shouting, jumping around the porch, kissing his mother and his wife before going to get the bottle of champagne that had been waiting in the refrigerator. At moments like these, it seemed absurd to consider him as his replacement. Salvatore was microscopic in experience and maturity compared with John Morale, Frank Labruzzo, even Joe Notaro. Bill filled his father’s glass, stepped back, lifted his own, then proposed a toast.

  “To victory, Dad.”

  “To victory,” the don concurred, wondering about a possible victory elsewhere and if he should allow himself to celebrate it in advance.

  In Havana, Contreras and Heller watched the screen in silence way past commercials and the station’s farewell.

  “Turn it off, Ox,” said Heller in a begging tone.

  “I’m waiting to see if you’ve really become disabled after a few days of playing the part.”

  “C’mon, be a good buddy, will you?”

  “Okay,” Contreras said, and got up. “But let’s start getting ready.”

  “So soon?”

  “The waiting is over, Abo. Let’s get moving.”

  And Elias Naguib, happy to get back to his usual routine, briskly crossed the hall of his Alturas del Country mansion to order his car brought out.

  …

  The guests of suite 406 went up to the bedroom fifteen minutes after the final curtain descended on the World Series. Contreras retrieved the third suitcase, which had remained unopened in the closet, and let it rest on the bed he hadn’t slept on. He checked the hair under a tiny strip of Scotch tape on the left side, just where both halves joined, before unlocking the suitcase with a small key and unbuckling the straps. He laid several bundles wrapped in old clothes on the bed.

  Each man assembled one sawed-off, double-barreled 12-gauge Remington shotgun. Having repeatedly checked their lock and percussion mechanisms, Contreras unwrapped a bayonet, positioned its handgrip under and between the barrels of his shotgun, and, with Heller holding it in place, spent two yards of electrical tape to firmly bind it to the shotgun. A second bayonet was attached to Heller’s weapon. Whispering something about their contribution to the design of modern firearms, Heller handed over four cartridges to Contreras. The gray-haired man examined their brass bases, then inserted them in the chambers, locked the guns, and placed both under his bed’s mattress.

  Next, two .38 Colt Cobras were freed from rags. Six shells were slid into each cylinder before stuffing the pieces in leather holsters and putting both alongside the shotguns. Then Heller reached for a spool of fishing line—sixty-two threads of braided 3mm-thick linen with a 200-pound resistance—cut twenty 40-inch-long sections with a penknife, and made a running knot at one end of every section. While he was at it, Contreras unfolded two white-and-blue-striped pillow linings. Each had a zipper at one end, and he tested their run several times. Satisfied, he extracted two white pillowcases from the suitcase, which joined the linings inside a night table drawer.

  “The strongest man in the world is Charles Atlas, ain’t he, Ox?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Well, I tie up Mr. Atlas with this and give him a week to break loose. If he does, I’ll let him hang me by the balls with this same line.”

  Contreras chuckled and waited as Heller divided the pieces of cord into five sets of four sections each, folded each set while taking care not to tangle up the strings, then tucked them into different pockets of his jacket. Contreras reached out for two pairs of white cotton gloves, tossed one to Heller, and began putting on the other.

  “Okay,” the older man said. “Let’s do it.”

  They devoted an hour and a half to cleaning their fingerprints off everything. Downstairs, Heller conscientiously rubbed a cloth over the furniture, doors, moldings, light switches, and assorted gadgets as
Contreras determinedly did the same upstairs. They plopped down on armchairs and lit cigarettes just after half past five.

  “Gloved cats don’t catch mice,” said Heller, looking at his hands.

  “We’re the mice here, so keep them on. I have the feeling we’ve overlooked something.”

  Not one word was spoken for almost three minutes as they went over details in their minds.

  “If all goes well, the shotguns stay here, right?” Heller asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s wipe them clean.”

  “My fault,” Contreras said, standing up.

  Later, the gloves were stripped off for showers and a change of clothes; then again at 7:50 P.M., to admit a busboy who brought supper. As soon as the man left they put them on again and dined on soup, salmon steaks, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, beer, bread, and espresso. Contreras lit a cigar, Heller a cigarette. Pretending to be unconcerned, they watched Jueves de Partagás on Channel 6. Heller didn’t even smile at the jokes of a comedian doing a marvelous “affectionate drunk,” didn’t object to the flow of commercials, didn’t praise the beautiful chorus girls. His ashtray had accumulated three butts in three hours, unusual for a six-a-day smoker. Contreras’s mind kept moving from the suite to the casino to the country house. From Heller to Fermín to Loredo to Rancaño to Naguib. Back to the shotguns, the tape. Did fingerprints remain on the sticky side of tape? Maybe, but when it was pulled off they disappeared—or didn’t they? And the pieces of cord …

  “Abo?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s the cord?”

  “Here, in my …” Heller stopped mid-sentence as he felt the pockets of the jacket he was wearing. “Damn!”

  “You left them in the other jacket. Go get them.”

  At 10:11, Heller rolled up to the side of the roulette table, looking confident and unconcerned in a chocolate-colored poplin suit, a white dress shirt, and a beige tie. Several women tried to picture him physically fit. Pushing the wheelchair’s handlebars, Contreras re-created the sadness of a self-sacrificing father who finds himself taking his son to the last place on earth he’d want him to be. The short lapels of his outdated suit hardly allowed a glimpse of the pale green tie he wore. The spurious paralytic placed his chips on the green felt, enthusiastically rubbed his hands, then nodded politely to the Philadelphia physician who seconds earlier had been the only player at the table.