The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  "No, I mean the date."

  "The date? Let me— what's the date, Jimmy?"

  "Howafuck I know?"

  The cook slicked his hand across his head and checked a spattered calendar next to the cash register. "It's the first," he declared, "first of the month."

  March 1. The day I was to start work. I was due at work in three hours, showered, shaved, in a new tie— walking human capital. It took me another moment to remember I didn't live anywhere anymore. I checked the cash in my wallet.

  "You guys do me one more favor?" I said.

  "What. Anything, name it."

  "I want you guys to call me a car into Manhattan."

  "Can't."

  "Why?"

  "I'm driving you myself."

  "No, no, that's all right."

  "Come on, it's twenty minutes." The cook reached for his coat. "Jimmy, take the front." He pointed at the front door. "We're slow today, anyway. It's a slow week. Actually, the year's been pretty slow, matter of fact."

  We drove in silence in an old Chevy Caprice that looked repainted. Maybe an old taxi. I was immensely grateful. I asked the cook to drop me in midtown.

  "So, did you know these people who jacked you?" The cook turned his eyes onto me, and beneath their penetration, I couldn't lie. "Or was it just a surprise, wrong place-wrong time?"

  "Basically I knew them," I said.

  The cook nodded, as if he expected to hear this. "Let me tell you something," he said. "I used to be a cop. I retired. I got tired and I retired. But I seen a lot of things."

  I went rigid. "All right."

  "You want to go on, right, you want to avoid more trouble?"

  Had I shot a gun? Did I remember doing that? "Absolutely."

  "Don't try to get revenge."

  "It's not like that."

  He wheeled the car through Spanish Harlem. "Just listen to me. Don't try to get revenge, don't try to explain it to a bunch of people, don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. And don't go back to those people, don't associate, don't talk about it."

  "Okay." I realized I hadn't told him my name.

  "You got out with your skin, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "You're lucky."

  "Just go back to my old life, let time pass."

  He nodded as he pulled the car to a stop. "Yeah. Go back to your regular life and stay there. Die old."

  * * *

  How do you walk into your hotel at eight o'clock smelling of garbage, have no change of clothes, then two hours later arrive at a new job looking great in a new suit? Answer: It can't quite be done. I hurried stiffly into the hotel, showered, shaved, cleaned up, then padded downstairs in pants and a hotel bathrobe, bought a ridiculous red sweatsuit in a gift shop on Fifth Avenue, returned to the room, changed, then took a cab to Macy's, which opens at nine, bought a suit off the rack, shirt, tie, belt, socks, shoes, dressing in the little changing cubicle, then took the subway to work— and arrived seventeen minutes late.

  But it didn't matter. Dan was on the phone with someone— his new mistress, I learned later. That morning, after he had introduced me to the other principals (younger men and women straining on their leashes, eager for glory and promotions and big bucks) and the new assistants (three battle-hardened fiftyish women, attuned to health care benefits and flexible hours to see their grandchildren in school productions), and after I had inspected my office (decent, but nothing like my former one, which had a helicopter view of Lexington Avenue), after I had asked my assistant to order me stationery and a corporate American Express card, after I had established my new law firm e-mail account and signed the employment tax form, after I had done all these functional things and more, I slipped away to a pay phone on the street a few blocks away and dialed Allison, first at home. No answer. Then I dialed the restaurant. A recording came on, in her voice. The restaurant would be "closed for annual cleaning" the next three days, but would reopen on the weekend. Please call after 3 p.m. Friday to confirm or make reservations. And so on. I called Jay Rainey's number. I still had his keys. Nothing. I called Martha Hallock, but she hadn't heard from Jay. Neither had I, I said.

  I returned to my office, pushed the little bit of paper that was on my desk, made phone calls using a voice that sounded like mine, then returned to the hotel at the end of the day. From there I called Judith's attorney and left my new work number.

  Here, now, is where I begin to equivocate, to confess I told no one anything, to squirm my way free. A lawyer can be disbarred in ten minutes for being party to illegal activities, so naturally I considered going to the police, telling all that I knew and letting them sort everything out. But I didn't, really, know what might come of it, except trouble for myself. Poppy had been killed by Lamont, whom I might have shot. Gabriel and Denny, I suspected, were dead, given how violently they'd reacted to Ha's lovely pieces of sushi. Of course, these men had families somewhere. People would want to know what happened to them. But nothing I could say was bringing them back. Moreover, the matter with Marceno and the land was still unresolved. Poppy was dead, and whatever had been scrawled on the HAVANA ROOM napkin was with Jay Rainey. Don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. This, I reflected, was good advice. Illegal, immoral, unethical, unlawyerly, selfish, cowardly, flat-out wrong, and utterly reprehensible. But excellent advice nonetheless, and I quietly reported for work each morning, eager to lose myself in the business at hand, waiting each hour for the time that Timothy would arrive in the city. Timothy, my boy, my own lost child.

  * * *

  The following Saturday, I saw a small item in the metro section of the Times about one Harold Jones, a New York City rap club owner found next to a Dumpster behind a McDonald's in Camden, New Jersey. This was H.J. He'd last been seen alive in his limousine in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia late the previous Tuesday. Some boys had stolen the limo and joy-ridden it around for several days, H.J. apparently dead in the back, and they were wanted for questioning. I bought the Daily News and the Post to get the whole story. They played it smaller than I expected, probably because he had died out of town and there were no good photos and H.J. wasn't well known, anyway, except among certain black kids who went to his club. He wasn't a musician, didn't produce records. So went the cultural logic. Just a small-time businessman, in fact. Just another fat black guy with a gold watch pretending to be richer than he was. I ended up walking to the newspaper shop at Grand Central Station and buying the Philadelphia papers. The reporting was more detailed, and between all four papers, I could get a lot of the story. But I read that his driver didn't remember him taking any drugs. The paper said toxicology reports were inconclusive. Who knew what he had in his bloodstream at any given time? He'd gotten in his limo after a meeting in midtown, carrying a leather bag, hollered something, and been driven to Philly. Fell asleep in the car, said the driver. The driver got stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike, finally reached Philly, the black neighborhood of Overbrook. Big house, big party. The driver said he'd opened the limo door, swore he saw H.J. sitting in the limo. Soon people were in the back with him. Talking, partying. The limo driver admitted he ended up in a back room for the rest of the night. The limousine itself was found parked on the football field of a high school in Chester, Pennsylvania, a dying industrial town hanging off the underbelly of Philadelphia. How Harold Jones ended up in Camden, New Jersey, and his car twenty miles away in Chester, Pennsylvania, was unknown. The police found "drug paraphernalia" in the backseat of the car as well as "an undisclosed amount of cash." This would have been whatever was left of the extra purchase money I had negotiated for Jay, money originally earned, when you thought about it, by Chilean vineyard laborers thousands of miles to the south. I was surprised any remained at all. One could picture the scene, people finding H.J., a fat bag of cash, loud music outside a house, confusion, hours passing, rumors of a dead man, move the car, yo, not on my property, gimme them keys, move his dead ass someplace el
se. Which they did.

  I studied the papers, feeling odd, sickened all over again. You could say H.J. had brought all this on himself, but then again, he hadn't, for his original motivations were honorable; his grieving aunt had asked him to secure a death settlement for their family. I didn't expect to feel bad about H.J., yet I did.

  On the next Monday I reached Allison at work.

  "Bill?" she answered warily. "Where are you?"

  "You know we have to talk, Allison."

  She insisted we not meet at the restaurant, so instead we found each other at the southeast corner of Central Park, across from the Plaza Hotel, and walked down the path to the pond ringed with green benches with IN MEMORY OF plaques on them. She looked good, Allison, fingernails manicured, one black pump in front of the other as she walked, put together, not a care in the world— just as I expected.

  "You saw about H.J.?"

  She nodded.

  "Probably the fish."

  "I don't know," she said.

  "What happened to Poppy? To his body?"

  "I don't know."

  "What happened to Denny and Gabriel?"

  "Don't know."

  "Did I shoot Lamont? I did, didn't I?"

  "I couldn't tell. Honestly. I wasn't watching that. You might have just injured him."

  "There was a second shot, I think. All that noise…"

  "No one heard," she said. "Because of the vacuuming upstairs."

  "Who took the second shot?"

  "You didn't kill Lamont," she admitted. "He was just injured. He was waving his gun around."

  "Someone else shot him? Who?"

  She shrugged. I got a feeling.

  "You shot him?"

  She didn't answer.

  "Jesus, Allison."

  "It was horrible, that's all I'm going to say."

  "Ha? What happened to him?"

  "He's gone. Totally gone."

  "Moved?"

  "Disappeared. His little room at the top of the restaurant is cleaned out. He could be anywhere."

  "If they come looking, then he draws the suspicion towards himself."

  "Yes, I suppose so. He would think of that."

  "What about all the videotapes of people going in and out of the steakhouse? You have all those cameras. Did Ha take the tapes with him?"

  "No."

  "So there's a record of everyone going into the place last Monday afternoon?"

  Allison shook her head. She was composed. She had no worries. "The tapes get automatically erased with a magnet and reused every forty-eight hours. The machine does it by itself unless told not to."

  "Days and days past. Erased three times over since then."

  She nodded. "Has Jay called you?"

  "No."

  "I thought he might have."

  "Did he leave after I passed out?"

  "Yes," she said. "He left."

  "I sort of remember him coughing."

  "He was coughing."

  "Did he say anything, about his daughter, before he left?"

  "Not to me," she said, voice tight.

  "He just left."

  "Yes."

  "He got up and walked out?"

  "Yes."

  "You saw this."

  "Ha told me."

  "What about H.J.?"

  "He climbed the stairs and got out. The staff didn't see him go. Only a few people had showed up and they were in the kitchen. I think he had that limo waiting."

  "What about Lamont? He was shot."

  But she wasn't saying anything.

  "What did you do, lock all the bodies in the Havana Room, open the restaurant like normal, then get rid of everybody after you closed?" I pictured the clientele arriving, the coat check girl collecting her tips, the waiters and cooks, the whole show, Allison coolly running the evening, while down in the Havana Room there were bodies on the floor, including mine.

  "What do you mean?"

  "How many bodies went out of there, Allison?" I remembered the man's shoes I'd glimpsed in the van.

  She didn't answer.

  "Did Ha think I was dead?"

  "I don't know."

  "He did, I bet. Did you think I was dead, Allison?"

  She turned to me. "I did, yes. Well, I wasn't sure."

  "You didn't bother to come over and feel for a pulse, to see if your old friend Bill Wyeth, who you'd dragged into this mess, was still barely breathing?"

  "I was upset, Bill. Ha told me just to work upstairs. He stayed down in the Havana Room. I never went down there again that night, okay? He called some people, some Chinese men he knows, he said a van would come. I think they carried some of the bodies up the stairs, then down through the kitchen and up through the sidewalk doors. It would be easier that way. No one would see." She nodded. "Ha took care of everything. When I went downstairs to the Havana Room the next morning, it was clean, really clean."

  "And Ha?"

  "Like I said, then he was gone."

  Allison was lying about something, but just what, I didn't know. I pretended a dull acceptance of all that she'd said, and casually got up to leave.

  "Bill?"

  "I'll come around the steakhouse, give me a little time."

  Allison stared at me, then looked straight at the pond as if she didn't know I was still there, as if she had never known me.

  If Jay had in fact walked out of the steakhouse, it would have been without his keys. Because I still had them. But certainly he had another set in his apartment. Had he moved his truck? Did it matter that my fingerprints were on the door handles and probably inside on the passenger side? Maybe not, but I didn't want to have to worry about it. And also, it was probably a good idea to see what was still in the truck. I caught the subway downtown to his building on Reade Street. It took me twenty minutes to find his truck three blocks away. A week had passed, and the windshield was plastered with three bright parking violation stickers threatening to tow the vehicle the next day. I found the right key on the ring, opened the passenger's door, keeping my gloves on, and removed the girls' basketball schedule I'd seen earlier. Had I not gone to that game, H.J. might never have found me. Nor would I have been hired by Dan Tuthill, for that matter. I tucked the schedule into my pocket. Anything else connected to Sally Cowles? I checked under and behind the seats, in the back, the glove compartment, behind the sun visors, everywhere. Nothing. I pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed hard over the passenger's dash, inside window, and handle. Then on the outside of the driver's door. Nobody saw, and nobody cared, anyway. I was just being paranoid, probably. I locked the door and slipped away, remembering to throw the handkerchief and the schedule in a trash basket a few blocks south.

  The following evening, I made a point of walking down to Reade Street. Rainey's truck was gone, no doubt now sitting impounded in a city lot. I'd bought a handsaw and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags. I opened the building, took the stairs quietly, then opened the empty office adjacent to Cowles's. In a few minutes, I'd picked up the trash. Then I turned my attention to the strange hooded tennis-judge chair, cutting it apart and bagging the pieces. After that I took a hammer to the lipstick cameras and their computer, then tore out the secret phone wiring as far as I could trace it. An hour later the refuse was bundled onto the street, and the office looked marred by some incomplete repair. I spent another half an hour looking for anything else in the office that might be a problem, then checked the basement, finding nothing there.

  * * *

  I called Jay a few more times after that, halfheartedly, each time from a different pay phone, never leaving a message. Then, finally, I could not help myself, could not resist the temptation, and took the subway to Brooklyn two nights later and walked to his apartment. It was dark and there was no light on at the top of the garage stairs leading to his door. The glass had not been replaced in his door but someone had hammered a piece of plywood over the hole, from the inside. I had the keys. I cupped my hand against the glass and could see only Rainey's neat camp bed,
the blinking light of the oxygen compressor. Was there anyone inside, was he dead on the kitchen floor? I found the right key, then checked behind me. Someone was standing on his stoop across the street, trying to light a cigarette. He hadn't necessarily seen me, but if I turned on the lights in the apartment, he'd know someone was inside. I'd made a mistake coming at night. I eased down the stairs, eased away.

  * * *

  In this mood of worried self-protection it occurred to me that I should probably get rid of my rotten walk-up apartment on Thirty-sixth Street. I called the super and said I'd like to pay for any necessary repairs, then break the lease. He laughed and told me don't bother, we rented it three days after you left. Have a nice life, mister. So I found a small sublet near my old neighborhood on the Upper East Side, one with an extra bedroom this time, and I moved in.