Havana World Series

by Jose Latour

  Twenty-two minutes later, sitting in the police cruiser’s front seat, the sergeant addressed the corporal before turning the ignition.

  “That woman is the most beautiful piece of ass I’ve seen in my entire life. No makeup, no fancy dress, no hairdo, nothing. Just unadulterated plain beauty.”

  The corporal shook his head. “No wonder the guy hit a casino.”

  The sergeant stared ahead, still under the spell. Then he dipped two fingers into the handkerchief pocket of his jacket and extracted fifty twenty-peso bills folded at the middle. “Here,” he said, peeling off five and handing them to the corporal.

  “C’mon, sarge, be a buddy.”

  “Okay, here,” and the sergeant detached five more bills from the wad.

  …

  Jacob Shaifer closed the door behind him, shot a glance at Lansky, then felt for the hypotensive pills in the right pocket of his jacket. His boss’s face had the flushed tone well known to him; probably his ears hummed like a beehive as well, Shaifer thought. Lansky swallowed the drug and agreed to rest for a while at his private suite. He swayed as they waited for the elevator; Shaifer held him by the arm. At 10:36 P.M., while resting on his Havana Riviera bed, Lansky sent for his Cuban cardiologist.

  His hypertension was totally unpredictable. It could go wild in the middle of a crisis or on the most placid occasion, like that particular day, when all had been propitious. In the afternoon, Lansky had welcomed the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to Cuba at the Fifth Avenue mansion. General Trujillo’s envoy expressed his government’s interest in doing business with Mr. Lansky. He underscored that the terms his country was willing to offer would be as advantageous to all parties concerned as those agreed on with the Cuban government, maybe even better.

  Before leaving for the Havana Riviera, Lansky had gotten a phone call from New Jersey breaking the news that a bunch of high rollers would arrive on the twenty-first. At the hotel he took a local call from Grava and learned that a fourth Capri creep had been canned and that the colonel would give fifty-six thousand pesos back to Mr. Lansky at Number One’s earliest convenience. Trafficante had also phoned, to chitchat a little, and told Lansky that the previous evening a potato grower from the town of Güines lost forty-two thousand at the Deauville’s wheels. Good news coming from every direction, but after the doctor measured Lansky’s blood pressure, he gave the patient a shot in the arm. Alone with Shaifer at last, Lansky lit a Pall Mall as soon as the beehive in his ear subsided.

  “You’ll fly to Tampa in the morning,” he said to the man he trusted most. “Nick has to be retired.”

  Shaifer assented reflectively. “Okay, but it’ll create a problem with Mr. Costello.”

  Coming from Shaifer, the observation was disappointing, Lansky thought. Did his friend believe for a second he didn’t know it would? Or was he just putting the most important outcome of his decision on the table for discussion? Possibly. Lansky knew that Shaifer was a lot brighter than he seemed.

  “Let me put it this way. That problem will be less serious than that created by Nick, and we ought to be able to deal with it. He has managed to freeze a hundred-million-dollar expansion program by making Frank waver. A hundred fucking million bucks in cold storage because a guy thinks things might change. He doesn’t approve of Angelo’s retirement, believes I swallowed Bonanno’s bait. Maybe he’s making secret contributions to the rebels, building bridges to become the go-between if they seize power. He figures that my being Batista’s pal would disqualify me to deal with a new government. But you’re right—it’ll bring trouble with Frank … unless you manage to make it look like an accident, or like somebody else did it.… Hey!!”

  Suddenly looking delighted, Lansky slapped his forehead and paused to consider what had just popped into his mind. “Sure, let’s make it seem Bonanno and Profaci ordered him retired on account of Angelo Dick. How could this not have occurred to me before? Of course! Let’s work it out. I’ll admit I was wrong at a meeting with Frank. Nick will be present, invited by me. I’ll pretend there’s no disagreement, no hard feelings. In the meantime you check out the torpedoes in the Profaci family, choose the most promising, pay him to take out the sonofabitch. When he fulfills his part of the deal, retire him, too, in the open, for going after one of our men. Meanwhile, you and Moshe organize a neat accident, in case the first plan backfires. Take your time—think, plan ahead. Money is not a consideration. I want two Christmas presents from you: Nick’s retirement and a clean nose.”

  Shaifer nodded and smiled—a little sadly, perhaps. The man who had convinced everybody that wars between families were a waste of time and money was slipping badly in old age.

  …

  The Plaza Cívica was intended to become the new pulsing center of governmental power. On one square kilometer of choice real estate, brand-new public buildings encircled a huge square. Behind the monument to José Martí that served as focal point stood the Palace of Justice. Facing the statue were the General Accounting Office and the Ministry of Communications. To the right, the highest building of all would soon house Havana’s municipal government. The National Theater and the headquarters of the National Lottery were still under construction. Including the wide new avenues, around one hundred thousand tons of steel had been embedded in half a million tons of concrete over three years.

  On the eastern side of the Plaza stood the recently inaugurated National Library, a vast, four-floor cube with a central eleven-story tower that stored all forms of printed material. Compared with the just-vacated Old Havana building, it was an exercise in modern, sober functionalism. The limestone, glass, and aluminum exterior was in tune with a well-ventilated interior where marble, granite, and natural lighting reigned. The main entrance was on the first floor. In the basement were the children’s and circulating sections. Visitors had to ascend a curved driveway, traverse a huge lobby, and stroll through a long, wide hallway before reaching the spacious, well-appointed reading room, with its new, made-to-order bookshelves, reading tables, writing desks, and chairs, all constructed of precious wood.

  On October 17, a Friday, at 4:05 and 4:07 in the afternoon, Officers Garrido and Castillo marched into the library pretending they didn’t know each other. Two female assistants patiently explained to each new reader how to fill out the forms. Garrido asked for a manual on automotive mechanics; Castillo chose a book on baseball. Sitting at different reading tables, neither seemed very keen on learning about car tinkering or how to throw curves.

  “It looks like one of those days,” Evelina Vergara said to Leticia Lesnik once she had finished with Castillo. In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely.

  At 4:33 P.M., a short bald man puffing on a cigar arrived at the library. He approached a huge cabinet storing thousands of alphabetically arranged cards and slid a drawer out. The tips of his fingers were bandaged. Leticia glanced at Evelina and rolled her eyes. Did the guy bite his nails to the quick? Evelina whispered she thought she had seen him once before, but wasn’t sure. Laboriously Fermín filled out a form for Alexander Braghine’s The Enigma of Atlantis in an Argentinean edition. After the book arrived, he chose a table in the reading room, opened the volume, and began reading. At 4:46 an obese, middle-aged man shuffled in. Wearing a starched guayabera and dark green pants, Ureña asked for a book on confectionery, then took a seat at the end of the same reading room. Evelina and Leticia exchanged astonished glances. It definitely was one of those days.

  As the time went by, the bald man’s nervous glances seemed to infect those around him. By six o’clock Castillo, Garrido, and Ureña had somber expressions. At 6:37 the overweight sergeant returned his book and left. A minute later the short guy, beaming and looking extremely pleased, did the same. At 6:40, simultaneously, the men interested in mechanics and baseball departed.

  “What a quartet,” Leticia said as she carried the books to a small lift that would return them to their Ork
in-fumigated bookcases.

  …

  Whenever the owner of the Roxy movie theater received a thriller or a mystery from his distributor, he walked two and a half blocks, knocked on Benigno Ureña’s front door, and said—to the man’s wife, usually—that it would be an honor to treat the sergeant to a private showing of that week’s feature film. In addition, he left a flyer with the name of the picture, its top stars, and the rest of the cast. Out of fifteen or twenty such invitations a year, Ureña accepted two or three. The fuming projectionist doing unpaid overtime would begin running the film close to midnight, once the last public showing had finished.

  The stratagem of isolating the policeman was the only clever way the owner had come up with to prevent incensed mystery buffs from asking for a refund. When the man known in the neighborhood as Cannonball went to a regular show to watch a thriller, other moviegoers had learned, he acted bizarrely. During the first suspenseful scene, the obese man would chuckle. As the movie went on and more riddles and puzzles were added, the cop frequently guffawed. If the solution was inductive or derived from a microscopic clue or several brilliant conjectures, he split his sides uproariously, then wiped away the tears streaming down his cheeks. No one in his right mind wanted to risk an evening in jail for shushing him.

  The five-foot-seven man with sparse brown hair had the same age and waistline—46. After twenty-three years in the force and an eighteen-year childless marriage, Ureña’s elementary school education had fallen back to third or fourth grade in mathematics and Spanish. Since he belonged to the tolerated but never accepted category of the pure professional, devoted considerable chunks of his free time to studying the behavioral patterns of Havana’s best-known criminals, and didn’t extort money from retailers, he only had made sergeant second-class.

  Ureña had never cracked open a book on criminology and declined most lab results with thanks. Occasionally he slapped disrespectful young punks in the face, but he was against more brutal methods and had never tortured or killed a man. Despite such significant shortcomings, he got assigned to the most important cases because he had the best snitches in town, a prodigious memory, and the tenacity of a spider dwelling in a coop. Among his remarkable feats was Contreras’s busting back in ’45, which was why Grava assigned him the Château Miramar case. The hulking Benigno Ureña was a simple, honest man totally lacking in guile, the only one of his kind among all those involved in the Capri heist and the subsequent murders.

  The election was getting close and the chief of the Bureau of Investigations was hard-pressed for men to take preemptive action against demonstrations, so Grava figured he could deemphasize the real reason for a minor personnel shuffling. He sent for Ureña on October 24, a Friday. Everybody knew that if the regular chain of command was bypassed, something illegal was brewing. The professionals who had chosen to ignore official criminality loathed Grava’s summonses as much as the experts on third degree and the corrupt cops from the Department of Supplies loved them.

  Grava was a dresser, and Ureña’s cheap, outmoded, and crumpled black muslin suit made the colonel frown with displeasure.

  “You’re taking Gallego back to the library this afternoon,” Grava affirmed.

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Talavera and Brunet will go with you.”

  Immediately, Ureña realized that Mariano Contreras had been sentenced to death, but he swallowed his revulsion and faked the indifference of moral eunuchs.

  “As you order. What shall I say to Garrido and Castillo?”

  “Tell them to wait. I’m having both reassigned to the special Election Unit. You won’t use radio cars, right?”

  Ureña wondered whether the man was an absolute idiot. “Of course not, Colonel.”

  “Well, if you nail Ox, leave him with Talavera and Brunet and phone me from the Ministry of Communications.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said as his imagination flashed forward. In the huge Plaza, facing the José Martí Memorial, Grava’s cronies would retrace two steps, aim their guns at Contreras’s back, and pull the trigger, one shot each. Prisoner trying to escape.

  “Dismissed,” the colonel ordered, then pressed an intercom key. Ureña sighed, rose, and left Grava’s office.

  That afternoon Evelina and Leticia, the librarians, witnessed a nearly identical replay of the previous Friday. There were two new bibliophiles and fewer bandages on the short bald man’s fingertips, but when the four strange readers left, the heavy man with the sweet tooth appeared to be nearly as relieved as the victim of the strange accident. Before going back to the Bureau, from a pay phone on the ground floor of the Ministry of Communications, Ureña reported to Grava that Contreras hadn’t shown up. Meanwhile, Talavera and Fermín waited in a ’58 Austin Cambridge and Brunet impatiently tapped the wheel of a ’56 Studebaker.

  Over the next six days the sergeant slowed down considerably and developed a very bad temper. Scruples lurking in his conscience surfaced. For the first time ever, he found himself involved in a stakeout aimed at killing a fugitive in cold blood. Ethical considerations aside, the reason escaped him. Grava’s lust for money was legendary, and shooting Contreras on the spot would make restitution impossible. Returning money to its legal owners almost always brought about a kickback that went to line the colonel’s pocket. Like many other officers, Ureña had learned about Grava’s tantrum after being told that Loredo had been shot dead before revealing where he’d stashed his cut. It dawned on the sergeant that something vital concerning the Capri robbery had escaped him. In fact, he lacked three essential facts jealously guarded by Grava: the total stolen, what had been given back, and Lansky’s request that he question Contreras personally.

  Filled with serious misgivings, he entered the colonel’s waiting room at dusk on October 30, a Thursday. He spent the next two hours and ten minutes sitting on a hard mahogany bench. Anticipating good news, Grava smiled when he saw the sergeant waiting for him and waved him into his office.

  “Get me a beer,” Grava ordered to the aide on the graveyard shift. “Would you like one, Ureña?”

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “Permission to leave,” the aide said.

  “Granted.”

  Grava freed his waist from a 9mm Browning automatic and shoved it into the right top drawer of his desk. He pointed at one of the two armchairs; Ureña made the cowhide creak horrendously when he sat. Grava eased himself into the swivel chair.

  “Spill it out, Ureña. I see you’re crammed.”

  “Me? Crammed?” the astounded Ureña said, pointing at his chest with his thumb.

  “What were you doing out there? Waiting for a bus?”

  “No, Colonel,” the sergeant said, smiling blandly. “I just want your authorization to call off the library stakeout.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a waste of time. Contreras is too experienced to walk into it. He probably knows his buddies are in the can and won’t show up.”

  Grava nodded in apparent agreement. “I see. And what are you gonna do tomorrow? Scratch your ass?”

  Ureña felt something, his pride possibly, rebelling inside him. “With all due respect, sir—”

  “Answer me, you toad. Are you gonna scratch your fat ass all day long?!” Grava bellowed.

  The sergeant bit his lower lip and glanced at the top of the desk.

  “I’d keep investigating his whereabouts,” he said at last.

  “‘Investigating his whereabouts,’” Grava mimicked. “For three weeks you’ve been ‘investigating his whereabouts,’ cojones!

  Now, listen to me, Ureña. Tomorrow you take Gallego to the library. You nail Contreras, leave him with Brunet and Talavera, then give me a call. Is that clear, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, Colonel. Permission to leave.”

  “Get going. And ask the moron out there if he sent the orderly to the North Pole to get my fucking beer.”

  “At your service. Good evening.”

  “Fuck off, Ureña.”

>   Right then, the sergeant’s deep resentment toward his commanding officer evolved into hate.

  …

  Fermín Rodríguez scraped the aluminum plate, swallowed the last mouthful, then placed both the plate and the spoon on the coarse cement floor. He guzzled the remaining water in a discarded ten-ounce can of peaches, tilted it, and watched a few drops fall to the floor. After sighing deeply, he rose from the wooden stool; the waistband of his pants fell to his groin. Fermín jerked it up and with two steps reached a thin mattress on the floor. He wiped away two big cockroaches before sitting down on it and resting his back against the wall.

  Self-deprecation, finding himself in jail, the stench, and the lousy chow had made Fermín a very depressed man. He interrupted his arm-and-neck movement to learn the time of day. When he was taken to the showers, the guard’s watch had read 11:15. Goaded by the jailer, he had taken less than ten minutes to shower and shave, perhaps two more to dry off and to wipe his shoes clean on a leg of his dirty jail pants, so it must have been around 11:30 when he was marched back to his cell. His corn-flour-and-sweet-potato lunch had been served a half hour later, so he still had to wait over three hours for his usual Friday-afternoon ride.

  Sergeant Ureña would approach the cell, the hanger with the nicely washed and pressed clothes dangling from his thumb. He would greet him with something like “C’mon, Gallego, let’s go read a little,” then pass the garments through the iron bars. Getting dressed would make him feel momentarily like the man he used to be. Then, as soon as the tie was suitably knotted and he had slipped into the jacket, Cannonball would hand him a Bauzá cigar, the personal mark intended to fully restore his usual appearance and reward his collaboration. From their cells, Abo and Meringue would see him going out and wonder where he was being taken. They were kept in complete isolation, unable to meet even in the toilet, so probably neither of them knew he’d blown the trumpet on them. Or maybe Ureña had told them. But from the compassion shining in Abo’s gaze, he didn’t think so.