by Paul Monette
In the spring of 1980, under intense pressure from the United States, Cuba opened its port at Mariel Harbor, and thousands set sail for America.
They came in search of the American Dream.
One of them found it.
Those who challenged him, he crushed.
Those who tried to stop him, he killed.
“What the hell we gonna do when we get there?”
“Get rich,” Tony said quietly. An astonished look was in his eyes, as if he’d never spoken such a thing out loud. Perhaps he didn’t know it till he said it.
“Hey, I’m with you,” cried Manolo, clapping his hands three times and thrusting a fist in the air in a gesture of triumph. “Hey, Cousin Tony, we gonna get us a yacht?”
“Everything, pal,” said Tony Montana, his eyes still fixed on the far horizon. The chaos around him had vanished. He smiled at the open sea like an admiral. He clapped a hand on Manolo’s shoulder. “We’re gonna get us everything there is.”
Also by Paul Monette
POEMS
THE CARPENTER AT THE ASYLUM
NO WITNESSES
NOVELS
TAKING CARE OF MRS. CARROLL
THE GOLD DIGGERS
NOSFERATU (based on a screenplay by Werner Herzog)
THE LONG SHOT
LIGHTFALL
SCARFACE
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
MCA Publishing, a Division of MCA Communications, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / August 1983
Copyright © 1983 by MCA Publishing,
a Division of MCA Communications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: MCA Publishing, a Division of MCA Communications, Inc.
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ISBN: 0-425-06424-7
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To my mother and father,
forty years together and still counting,
and to Ethel Cross,
who taught me more about books than Yale did.
Chapter One
IT WAS ALL noise and chaos in the harbor. To the sailors on the rusted shrimp boats, it looked like the start of another revolution. They lay at anchor for three days running, unable to maneuver in the crowded waters. Two days’ catch rotted on the docks, ravaged by shrieking gulls, because the fish carts couldn’t get through the mass of officials and huddling families. Yet none of the fishermen dared complain, for this was a government operation. They prowled the decks and drank rum in the waterfront bars, waiting. Normal life would start up again. It always did. People had to have fish, no matter who was in power.
All across Mariel Harbor, the sleek American fleet nuzzled among the tugs and scows. These were all private craft, customized yachts and blue-hulled sailboats, gaudy with teak and chrome, manned by overfed weekend captains dressed in polyester whites. The customs officials veered among them in Soviet-made gunboats, barking orders and assigning numbers, but it was no use. The Americans pushed and clamored. Fistfuls of bribe money lobbed through the air. The rich men’s boats plowed through and hugged the docks. They were used to being served first.
The Cuban officials could not keep order. They had no army to back them up, because Castro didn’t want a military profile. The exiles themselves were no problem. They stayed with their families and their meager luggage, glazed from the long wait in the hot spring sun. They waved and called out to their cousins and friends in the waiting boats, who’d crossed from Miami to bear them away to freedom. But they didn’t surge forward, for fear they would rile the officials. The slightest false move, and they might be sent back to their desperate villages.
The problem was the demonstrators. Two hundred, three hundred strong, they swept back and forth along the pier, carrying placards and bawling. “Let them go!” they chanted. “Let the worms go!” They threw the exiles’ luggage into the harbor. They grabbed up the stinking shrimp from the fish troughs and pelted several families. They jeered till the children cried. They were students, mostly, and the placards they carried—“Death to the traitors!”—were the mirror of those their older brothers carried, back in the days of the revolution. They had no politics, to speak of. It was just an excuse for a holiday, a chance to throw stones at the boredom of it all.
Yet the immigration officers made no move to restrain them, any more than they tried to restrain the American journalists, clicking their cameras and shrilling their questions in bastard Spanish. For this was a propaganda event. It had nothing to do with the pitiful exiles, yearning to join their kinfolk on the solid gold streets of Miami. It had nothing to do with the students, who already had an autocrat in power and thus didn’t need to raise one up from the rabble. All of these were merely local color, immigrant and exile both. Only the officials, in their khakis and spit-shined shoes, badges gleaming in the noonday haze, dimly understood the larger purpose they all served. Because they were good bureaucrats, because they loved their government like a father, they knew they were doing their part to bring peace to the world.
For Castro was out to normalize relations with the Americans. In a gesture worthy of ancient kings, he had opened the harbor at Mariel and declared his people free to go. Some few, anyway. There were quotas, of course. Still, within seventy-two hours of his announcement, a flotilla of boats was on its way from the U.S. mainland. Three thousand boats in all, drunk on freedom and Carta Blanca.
Finally, after endless hours of triplicate forms and false alarms, a thin stream of refugees was permitted to gather at the end of the dock. The gleaming yachts jostled for position as the first was tied up to the piling. A couple of weeping refugee women reached out like beggars to the polished deck. The minicam unit from NBC-Lauderdale nearly trampled a child as it zoomed in for a close-up. All the hysterical energy of the last few days, the hope and terror and patriot zeal, was suddenly focused on that one spot where the first refugee would step off the dock into happy exile.
Nobody noticed the trucks. They came in a line between two warehouses, with armed police running ahead and behind. Five altogether, rumbling and grinding their gears, old trucks from the Second World War, probably Russian as well. It was a little late for the army. Most of the footage for the evening news was already in the can.
The police pressed the crowd back so the trucks could make the turn onto the pier. The guards who brought up the rear hurried forward as each truck braked. They released the chains on the tailgates, and the tailgates fell open with a grinding roar, striking the dock with a splinter of wood and sending the rats in the pilings below streaming into the water. Still the crowd didn’t understand. They strained to watch the immigration men check their final lists. They cavorted for the television crews. They spat at the boats from Florida.
Had anyone peered into the truckbeds, it would have taken several seconds to grow accustomed to the dark. The steaming sun beating on the water had made them all sea-blind. Perhaps they would have caught the stench before they saw a thing. If pain had a smell, if madness did, then this was how it stunk. Chains slithered and clinked in the darkness. Here and there a groan went up, but without any hope of mercy. Even the guards, as they prodded and cursed, winced with a kind of shame, as if they were horrified to bring what was in there out to the light of day.
Now you could see them. Th
ey lay there stacked together, their cheeks hollow, their eyes dead, manacled wrists held out in front of them, pleading like the damned. They were dressed in rags. Their heads were shaved. Now, as they slowly disentangled themselves and staggered forward, the sores stood out livid where the chains had rubbed. They hadn’t bathed in days. They whined at the glare of the sun. They stumbled down the ramp, dragging their chains. There must have been fifty or sixty in each truck, but somehow, only a couple had died of the heat. It wasn’t till they began to form lines, careful to do exactly what the guards said, that one saw how tough they were. They were dirty and vile, they had touched bottom—but they had no plans to die.
What were they doing here? There must have been some mistake. What kind of propaganda was this?
The demonstrators had seen them now. They shook their placards and crowded forward, grumbling with scorn and ridicule. The hollow men stood in ranks beside the trucks, staring ahead unblinking as the guards cut away the dead ones. The police held the students back, till they stood face to face with the line in chains. And the grumbling stopped. And the placards fell like broken kites. For the holiday was done.
Out on the end of the dock, an immigration official spelled out the procedure for the third time to the red-faced captain of a forty-foot boat called “Shangri-La,” out of Sarasota. “We have you down for four families,” explained the official. “This means you will take twenty anti-socialists as well.”
“Listen, I can’t handle thirty-five people on this boat. You want me to sink?”
“That is not an immigration problem,” replied the other coolly. “The formula’s fixed in Havana. Take it or leave it.”
The captain had no choice. He came as a conquering hero, savoring the hero’s welcome that awaited him back in Florida. He couldn’t return empty-handed. Hordes of anxious relatives paced the port of Miami, praying for the safe return of the so-called “Freedom Flotilla.” The captain cast an anxious glance along his shining deck. Inside the main cabin the luncheon table was set for six and getting cold. As long as they encountered no turbulence, he thought. The sky was blank, without a shred of cloud. As long as the refugees stayed where they were told.
“All right,” he murmured to the bored official, trying to remember where he’d stowed his gun. Wondering what the hell these commies meant by anti-socialists.
Back by the trucks, a sergeant of police went methodically down the line, unlocking the manacles at each man’s wrists. As he passed among them he spoke in a surly undertone, scarcely pausing to draw a breath. “Go on,” he sneered, “go suck the tit of the bitch-whore America, you ugly bag of garbage. See what they do to you there. You’ll starve in the streets, you pigs.”
On and on he cursed them, rhythmic as a priest passing out the sacrament. None of the men gave a flicker of response, for fear he would not release their cuffs. The students watched with a kind of horrible fascination. For a moment pity was in their eyes. But somehow the contemptuous words of the sergeant taunted and teased them, till finally they came to their senses. They began to whisper to each other out of the corners of their mouths. “Convicts,” they said. “Traitors. Killers. Perverts.”
Soon they were jeering out loud, calling across the no-man’s-land that separated them from the men in chains. The sergeant grinned when he heard the chorus, and his rabid curses came faster and sharper. He had freed perhaps fifty men from their chains. A hundred more stood waiting, while others still spilled from the final trucks. The free ones looked as chained as ever. They stared across at the shouting students, not sure they hadn’t been brought here to be lynched.
The last truck disgorged its shame. These had to be dragged out by the guards. They emerged like frightened animals, unchained because the chains were all inside them. They wore hospital gowns. They carried their dim belongings in pitiful bundles. These were the hopeless mad, and as soon as the students saw them, the fury of the curses grew. “Send them away!” the demonstrators cried. A shiver of exultation was in their shouting now. At last they could rid the state of all its tainted blood. Send away the sick. Send away the old. There was no end to what they could purge.
The sergeant’s eyes gleamed as he came to the next prisoner in line. Before he inserted his key he yanked the chain, and the manacles cut so deep that a ring of blood blossomed at either wrist. The convict clenched his jaws, but he gave no cry. “You too, Scarface,” sneered the sergeant. “Go lick the feet of the millionaires. Let them grind their boots in that scum face of yours.”
With that he flicked the key—once, twice—and the manacles fell to the dock. And the scarfaced one, in the young angry prime of his life, kicked back his head and laid a full wad of spit in the sergeant’s eyes.
“Fuck you and fuck Castro,” growled Tony Montana.
The sergeant went white. The spit coursed down his cheeks like crocodile tears. He drew back his fist and landed a punch square on Montana’s cheekbone, just at the tip of the scar. Montana didn’t even seem to feel it. A curl of a smile touched his upper lip as he spoke again: “And fuck your Communism up the ass.”
The quaking sergeant let fly with a second punch, an uppercut to the jaw. Montana hardly winced. He turned his head to the side and spit out a tooth and a mouthful of blood. The sergeant was crazy. He shoved Montana back, meaning to get him behind the truck so he could beat him to a pulp. But suddenly a rough hand clamped down on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Leave it alone,” snarled the captain of police. “Let’s get them on the boats.”
Reluctantly, the sergeant turned once more to the line of manacled men. The captain shouted through a bullhorn at those who were already free, ordering them to the end of the dock. “Keep your papers in your left hand,” he commanded. “Once you set foot on a boat, you are no longer a citizen of this country. If you lose your papers, the Americans will shoot you.”
The convicts moved along the pier, the students heckling on all sides. Most of these men had been in solitary, some for as long as five years, but they fell naturally into groups and gangs, banding together the way they did in the exercise yard or down in the mess. They weren’t friends, exactly. Any one of them would have killed the man beside him for an extra packet of cigarettes. Yet they knew that safety lay in numbers, and nobody wanted to board a boat without some men he knew to back him up. They were going into enemy territory. They needed to be an army.
Only Tony Montana walked alone. Even in his broken cardboard shoes, his grimy shirt pocked with holes, his shaved head and his prison-gray skin, he walked like a prince, the rock of the hips and shoulders like a panther. His eyes were so pure in their fury, they looked as if they could burn through steel. He was twenty-five and rock-hard. He had made no alliances during his five years in jail, because he didn’t need a blessed thing.
None of the other convicts had ever made a move on him. They gave him a wide berth, because they knew the type. A man who was going to explode one day, muscle and tissue and brain, a man who could live or die, take it or leave it, kill or be killed. The long thin scar that zigzagged down his cheek like a bolt of lightning made men shrink and touch their faces, terrified of pain. Now and then you saw a man in jail who was born with nothing to lose. A man like that didn’t make deals. He didn’t sleep, and he didn’t dream. He just waited for the next chance. And when it finally came, he’d kill the whole world if it stood in his way.
When Tony Montana reached the crowd at the end of the dock, his quick eyes took in the whole operation. A dozen refugees were already huddled on the deck of the first yacht in line. While the captain bellowed in protest, a score of convicts was led to the gangplank. The captain wouldn’t let them on till the guns had been brought up from below. He even demanded manacles, but the immigration men stood belligerent. As the argument raged back and forth, Tony Montana wanted no part of it. He knew he would land in Miami branded as an undesirable if he went over on one of the rich men’s boats. He looked out to the harbor, beyond the yachts, searching among the American fleet for somethi
ng big and ugly, where a captain wouldn’t be so discriminating. His eyes picked out a fishing tub, proudly flying the stars and stripes. If he could just wait for that one, he thought—
“Hey, Tony,” called a friendly voice beside him.
His fists clenched as he turned. He found himself face to face with a grinning man about two years younger than he—darkly handsome, lean and tightly muscled, with an irrepressible laugh and a streak of nervous energy that made him seem to dance in place, like a fighter. He thrust out his hand. Montana made no move to take it.
“Same old Tony, huh?” said the stranger with a laugh, withdrawing his hand but taking no offense. “Manolo Ray. The little fox, remember? I’m your fuckin’ cousin.”
Montana cocked his head. His eyes darted left and right, as if to make sure nobody had witnessed his being called by name. Then he looked Manolo up and down, noting how the younger man managed to look dapper, even in prison rags. Somehow he had convinced somebody not to shave his head. Montana could tell he hadn’t been in long. He still had a little color.
“So what you been doin’, kid?” he asked in a voice that was oddly gentle.
“I been over Guantanamo, workin’ on a gang. They gimme two years for stealin’ a car. Hell, it was ready for the junkheap. Fuckin’ thing broke down right in front of a police station.” Manolo threw back his head and laughed, as if his own bad luck never kept him from enjoying a good story. “I heard they was shippin’ guys out to the States, so I ask the warden if I can go. He says I ain’t bad enough. You gotta be scum of the earth. I’m scum of the earth, I tell him. He says no dice. Cost me six hundred bucks to convince him. How ’bout you, Tony? Where you been?”
“You still talk too much,” Montana said.
“Yeah, sure,” replied the other with a grin. “You want to make somethin’ of it?”
For a moment Montana’s face went blank, the blank men had kept their distance from for years. This was how he looked when he pulled a trigger. There must have been a hundred men in the crowd who’d have scrambled for cover if they’d seen him then. But they would have been wrong. All of a sudden he broke into a grin that was the mirror image of Manolo’s. And he said: “Nope.”
