by Paul Monette
Suddenly Manolo came running out of the gym, waving and smiling. Though a group of Cubans were clustered around to shake Tony’s hand, he shrugged them off along with the towel and walked across the yard to meet his friend. They jogged together along the track so Tony could warm down.
“You ready for the good news?” asked Manolo.
“You got me a bout with Sugar Ray Leonard.”
“Better,” he said. “We’re outa here in thirty days.”
“Outa here where?”
“Miami,” retorted Manolo. “And that includes a green card. We got it made, chico.”
“Yeah?” Tony stopped jogging and shadowboxed for a moment. “What do we gotta do for it? Go to Havana and put The Beard away?”
“No. Somebody else.”
Tony looked startled. “You’re kiddin’,” he said, then after a moment: “You’re not kiddin’.”
“Guy named Rebenga. Emilio Rebenga.”
“Yeah,” said Tony, “I think I heard of him.” He began to walk back in the direction of the gym, as if all he wanted right now was a shower. He hadn’t said yes or no yet about killing Emilio Rebenga.
Manolo was waiting for him beside his locker when he stepped out of the shower room, shaking his head like a dog. As he dried himself, Manolo kept talking. “He’s comin’ in today, Tony. Castro just sprung him. Chi-Chi says he was top dog in the secret police in the old days, but then he and Castro had a big fight, and Castro put him away.”
Tony’s face was completely neutral. He stood at the cracked mirror across from his locker and methodically combed his hair. He hardly seemed to be listening to Manolo.
“Anyway, when Rebenga was in power he tortured some guys. Real nasty stuff. Includin’ the brother of some rich dude in Miami. Guy wants the favor repaid. What do you think?”
Tony finished combing his hair. He drew his fatigues from the locker and pulled them on. Manolo didn’t push him. He waited as Tony laced up his shoes. At last Tony turned to him. “If he was just a communist,” Tony said, “I’d prob’ly nail him for the fun of it. For a green card, I’ll slice him up like a loaf o’ bread if they want.”
Manolo grinned. “What kinda knife you want?”
“Stiletto.”
“You got it. What else you want?”
Tony checked his hair in the mirror one more time. He stretched his shoulders in his old gray shirt like a rich man shrugging in a raw silk jacket. “You think you can get me a riot tonight?” he asked. “I might want to make a little noise. And hey, Manny, you tell your guys we don’t leave here without Angel.”
Manolo nodded and went away like he was walking two feet off the ground. He took the four hundred dollars from Angel and went to the alleys and picked up, besides a sharkskin jacket and a pair of boots, a pearl-handled knife. By the time he got back to Tony, about four hours later, he had spoken to several gang leaders and set up a midnight operation. The gangmen were looking for any excuse to explode, and if Tony Montana needed a decoy to cover the killing of a Party cop, they were more than glad to oblige.
Manolo and Tony took a leisurely walk past the INS office just as Emilio Rebenga was being brought in. He looked about five feet tall beside the two agents who led him up the walk. He was bald on top, and he wore thick glasses. He kept looking nervously left and right, as if he was scared that the agents would turn on him. As the trio passed into the building, Tony spat in the dirt at his feet.
It began to rain about five o’clock, and dinner was served in the mess. Emilio Rebenga, who had no friends, took his tray to the very last table, where only the retards sat. He was just beginning to eat his apple pie when Tony Montana sidled up and bent over to speak. Instinctively Rebenga flinched. Tony said: “You ever hear of a guy name Edouardo Tice?” Rebenga’s face went blank, and Tony barely stayed two seconds. It was as if he knew that Emilio Rebenga would have to think long and hard to remember. In any case he didn’t eat the rest of his pie.
The rain got worse around ten o’clock. Rebenga lay on his bed in Barrack 4, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly he sat bolt upright. His eyes were wide with fear as he looked around the room at the hundred refugees he didn’t know. He spent the next half hour trying to think of a place to hide his money and papers. He had worked out a deal for a green card that would get him sprung from Chaffee tomorrow afternoon. He only had to survive the one night. About eleven o’clock he began to talk to a guard about getting some extra protection. They dickered a while over the price, but couldn’t reach a proper compromise. At eleven-forty-seven Emilio Rebenga ran out of time.
Six hundred refugees erupted from the barracks and stormed the main gate. “Libertad!” they shouted. “Libertad!” They had even managed to make some banners out of bedsheets, emblazoning their cry for freedom in raw red paint. One of the men in the phone line had placed a call to Channel 6, Little Rock, and a minicam unit arrived about ten minutes after the start of hostilities. Emilio Rebenga ran up and down Barrack 4, trying to decide where to hide his money. He was practically bouncing off the walls, he was so nervous.
The refugees threw stones and debris from the roof of Barracks 9 and 10. The guards were managing to keep several hundred at bay at the main gate, but refugees had snipped through the chain-link fence in a dozen places. Thirty or forty were already running away down the highway. The base had just decided to break out its squad of police dogs when Tony Montana appeared in the doorway of Barrack 4.
Rebenga froze. He was backed into an alcove beyond the rows of bunk beds, between the TV set and a pinball machine. Tony called out in a neutral voice, like someone announcing the rules of a game: “I come from the brother of Edouardo Tice.” Then he stalked the room, as the noise outside grew to a clamor. Loudspeakers blasted warnings. The dogs were yapping as if they were after a fox. Rebenga fell to his knees beside the TV set. He’d been a dead man since dinner time. Now he was so scared, he only had the wit to pray that it wouldn’t be long and slow, like the death of Edouardo Tice.
Tony reached the lounge area. He danced on the balls of his feet and tossed the knife from one hand to the other. His lips were parted in a kind of smile, and he hissed between his teeth. It sounded like someone had lit a fuse. Rebenga, who hadn’t been to Confession in thirty-eight years, clasped his hands before him and started whimpering in Latin. Tony darted in like a sword dancer and sank the stiletto in just below the right lung.
In Barrack 6 they had just set fire to their mattresses. The smell of gasoline was heavy on the hot night air. Someone had turned a radio on, and salsa blared in the flames. Tony stabbed him in the belly, in the shoulder, and by then he was down. A deep thrust to the back of the neck, like a bullfighter, and it was over.
Tony wiped the blade on the man’s shirt and walked away with a blank face. He could have done it with a single stab, of course. Till now, he had always tried to kill with a bullet to the brain. But it was as if for this, his first murder in America, he needed to leave a signature. He would not let them ignore him. He would make them pause for a moment’s silence when they heard about the death of Emilio Rebenga. Tony walked out of the barrack as if he had killed some monster who barred the gate to his freedom. In the red light of the riot he stood like a conqueror. The choke of mace was swirling in the air. The refugees were being driven back. Only Tony Montana had won tonight.
Chapter Three
MIAMI STEAMED IN the August heat. Neon rippled the boulevards, shimmering like a mirage that had gone too far, till the eye had lost the power to make it disappear by going close. Miami hadn’t changed in twenty years, except to get worse and worse. It was Vegas without the games. The lobbies of the big hotels still had a turquoise and orange patina, no matter how beige they were painted. Miami had stopped in the fifties, like a rich old bag with a lot of money her old man left her, spending it all on plastic surgery, tucking and snipping and ironing out her face till it looked like somebody’d died inside. The nights were slow and unbearably hot. You could only survive in Miami by revving up
, and you took whatever was available—speed, coke, bennies, booze, broads. It was said there were those who didn’t need any of that, who lived in Miami as dull and plain as if they were living in Kansas City, but they were a dying breed. And they never went out at night.
Southwest 8th Street, Little Havana, was what you might call the middle of the night. “Calle Ocho,” the street of bad dreams. Anything could happen, and anything did. Life wasn’t worth two plugged nickels, but oh was it gaudy. The Havanito Restaurante, 8th and Ocean, was the perfect symbol, for it lay at the heart of the dream. Revved up was the only way to go at the Havanito Restaurante. Some people swore it didn’t even exist in the daylight, when the sun came up like a giant lizard and swallowed your brains. Havanito was all shimmer—a whore on her third Q and her fourth trick of the evening. Totally wasted. Totally gone.
The parking lot was crammed with Cadillacs and Continentals, many of them repainted and customized for twice what they cost when they tooled out of Detroit. Young Cubans in flashy nightwear, gold-thread jackets and diamond solitaire pinky rings and alligator shoes, sat with their strapless dates in leatherbound convertibles, while the carhops brought out trays of hot fudge sundaes and banana splits. The ice cream stand at the Havanito Restaurante hadn’t served a child in years. This was late-night ice cream, for those who were so whacked out on drugs, so starved to death on vodka, they just had to have a little something smooth. They pigged like kids at a birthday party.
Inside, the Havanito Restaurante was a glitter dome, walled with mirrors and hung with enough chandeliers to light a stadium. The decor was Spanish-Moorish, naugahyde for days. At three A.M. every table was taken, and a glance around at the diverse beasts of the night showed what a serious social function the Havanito played in the life of Calle Ocho. The pimps and the dealers had come to the end of another long day of entrepreneurship, and now at last they had a chance to show their colors and vie for the glitter crown. Here among their own.
The waitresses moved like well-oiled troops, back and forth to the kitchen. Steaks and lobsters were the order of the day at three A.M., though most of the diners were so coked up they hardly took a bite. It must have been the swankest garbage in Dade County, though the waitresses had learned to doggy-bag the lion’s share of it, going home at dawn with pounds and pounds of sirloin and lobster tails under their arm. Not that the tips weren’t fabulous. If he liked your attitude, a Calle Ocho dealer thought nothing of laying an extra hundred on the bill. If only everyone in Miami could have worked at the Havanito Restaurante, there wouldn’t have been any poverty at all.
That’s what it looked like out in the glitter dome, anyway. Back in the kitchen things were a little different. In the scullery corner, where Tony Montana scrubbed the grease off a million pots and Manolo loaded the cavernous dishwashers, life was still lived at $3.50 an hour. They’d been out of Fort Chaffee for four weeks now, and they used up the cash they got paid for the hit just getting to Miami. They were bunked with two others in the extra room of a cruddy apartment behind an outdoor market where chickens were sold. It smelled like the slum alleys of Havana. The job at the Havanito Restaurante was the best they could get. All the refugees they talked to told them to shut up and be grateful.
“All I can say is,” Tony shouted over the noise of the running water, “your big shot friend better come up with somethin’ quick, or I’m gonna rob me a bank. I didn’t come to this country to break my achin’ back.”
“He’s comin’, he’s comin’,” Manolo shot back. “Trust me, will ya?”
When the mountain of pots was finished, they were both drenched in their long white aprons, as if they’d been caught in a storm at sea. They lit cigarettes and took a break in the linen closet, peering out through a cubbyhole into the main dining room. At table after table they could see young Cuban guys in fancy clothes and lots of gold, chiquitas curled beside them on the fat banquettes, their bodyguards just across from them, missing nothing as they watched the room.
“Look at that chick, man,” Manolo whispered, nodding at a booth not ten feet away. “Look at them knockers.”
“Yeah, look at the goon she’s with,” retorted Tony sullenly. “What’s he got that we don’t got?”
“Money, chico. Lots and lots o’ money. Coke money.”
“Junkies,” sneered Tony. “They got no fuckin’ character.”
He reached to stub his cigarette in the ashtray propped on Manolo’s knee. In the dim light of the closet, Tony saw his hand all shriveled white from the dishwater. A curious mix of associations flashed across his brain. He recalled his grandfather, grabbing Tony’s wrists and staring into his palms as if the old man was a fortuneteller. “You got good hands, boy,” he said. “Someday they’ll be picking gold right off the street.” He thought of Bogart, mosquito-bitten and backed to the wall, all the gold slipping through his fingers like water. He saw his own hand gripped around the stiletto, cutting the world to bits so it would look at him and quake.
The door to the closet swung open, and Jimmy Lee, the Rastafarian salad chef, stuck his nose in. “What you boys smokin’ in here?” he asked, his tongue licking at the corners of his mouth. His hair was in dreadlocks, and he had to wear it piled up under a net. He looked like Aunt Jemima.
“We’re just tootin’ a little Co’Cola,” Manolo said.
“You wish, honey,” Jimmy Lee answered dryly. “You got company out back. Looks like he died six months ago.”
Manolo gripped Tony’s arm: “El Mono’s here!”
Tony gave a small groan, as if he couldn’t take anyone seriously who sported a moniker. He walked through the kitchen behind Manolo, affecting a certain indifference. When they stepped out into the alley, Manolo went right over to where two men stood leaning against a burgundy Coupe de Ville. Tony hung back to check it all out. El Mono, “the Monkey,” lived up to his name. He was nervous and crooked and feverish, seeming to smoke about three cigarettes at once. His face was pocked and pitted like the moon. The other man, Martin Rojas, was an amiable, heavy-set man with a receding hairline. He looked like an off-duty cop.
“Hey Omar,” Manolo said, using the Monkey’s real name as he shook his little paw, “how’s it goin’? This is my friend I told you about—Tony Montana. He cut up Rebenga good. Hey Martin, meet Tony.”
The two men looked Tony up and down. Tony nodded curtly and stepped forward. Somehow he made it seem as if he had stepped away. Omar said: “You can handle a machine gun?”
“Sure,” said Manolo. “We was both in the army. Tony, he fought in Africa.”
Omar’s eyes flicked from Tony to Manolo: “Be at Hector’s bodega Thursday. Four o’clock. We’ll pick you up. You get five hundred each.”
“Hey!” cried Manolo, like it was a gift. “What do we gotta do?”
“We gotta do a boat, that’s what we gotta do.” Omar’s voice was completely neutral. He revealed exactly nothing.
“Okay, let’s do it,” said Manolo, smiling and nodding gratefully.
Suddenly Tony’s voice broke in: “We heard the going rate on a boat’s a thousand a night.”
Omar grinned. “Yeah, well first you gotta work your way up to five hundred.” He dropped his cigarette butt in the dirt and ground it out with his ratty tennis shoe. He began to walk around the car to the driver’s side. Tony took another step forward. Martin’s body seemed to tense, as if he stood ready to crouch and fight. Tony said: “What’d I do for you guys in the slammer, huh? Was that dominoes or what?”
Omar grinned a little wider, as if some private joke got better and better. His grin was the most simian thing about him. He looked like he’d just eaten a banana. He turned to Manolo. “What’s it with your friend, chico?” he asked pleasantly. “Don’t he think we couldna got some other space cadet to do that hit? Cheaper maybe?”
Tony shot back: “Then why didn’t you?”
Manolo said: “Hey, it’s okay, Omar. He’ll do it.”
Omar opened the door of the car. Martin got in on t
he passenger’s side. Omar continued to address Manolo. It was as if Tony wasn’t even there. “Just be happy you’re getting the favor this time, chico,” said the Monkey, nervously jingling the keys in his hand. “And tell your friend not to give us no trouble, or he’ll get his head stuck up his ass.”
He slipped into the car. He was so hunched over his head barely came above the steering wheel. The Cadillac came to life with a roar, and they screeched off up the alley, Manolo raising his hand to give them a last wave. Tony turned on his heel and strode back into the kitchen. Twenty more pots had been stacked in the old steel sink. Tony slipped the damp apron over his head and began to scrub savagely. Those pots were going to shine like silver before he was through.
The convoy headed down the empty highway. They’d just crossed over the bridge to Bahia Honda Key. It was two A.M. Tony Montana drove the lead sedan, with two other cars tight behind him. Martin Rojas sat in the passenger seat, muttering into a Gabriel walkie-talkie, radius thirty miles, forty on the open sea. Several voices crackled through the static. “Okay twelve, keep coming,” said one. “All clear, tango sierra.” Martin let out a string of numbers in Spanish. A second voice spoke through the darkness: “We love ya, twelve. No mosquitoes here.”
At an order from Martin, Tony turned off into a mangrove swamp. The road was rutted and full of puddles. Hundreds of crabs were scrambling across it. The tires of the convoy crushed them into the mud; nobody even felt them. They twisted through bushes that scraped the sides of the car, over roots and shell pits that jarred their teeth, till they veered toward a light and burst through into a clearing. A heavyweight North American moving van stood foursquare in the brush above the beach. Twenty men carrying machine guns stood guard all around it. It couldn’t have driven in through the swamp. There had to be a real road on the other side of the clearing. It occurred to Tony that his own convoy had been brought in roundabout, so they wouldn’t be able to find the place again.
