by Paul Monette
“C’mon, will ya!” Manolo shouted. “What are you—crazy?”
“You gotta take your time, chico. You never enjoy it otherwise.” He turned to survey the room once more, while Manolo gnashed his teeth. “Hell, I never robbed a bank before. It’s like poppin’ another cherry, huh? You get on your deathbed, chico, this is the stuff you remember.”
And with that, almost reluctantly, he followed Manolo out, and they jumped into the Monte Carlo. As Angel left the parking lot and disappeared into traffic, Manolo did a quick count. “ ’Bout eight grand,” he said, weary and frustrated. All he wanted was a drink. Chi-Chi was still dead to the world, and Angel and Gaspar were passing a reefer. Tony glanced mildly out the window, as if all he cared about was the view. “Next time,” Manolo grumbled, “we’ll plan it first.”
Tony stirred from his reverie. “Let’s get the rest of it now, huh? Long as we’re in the mood.”
Manolo sputtered in protest, as Tony nudged Angel and pointed to a parking lot on the right. Angel swung the Monte Carlo wide and headed in. It was a supermarket—medium-size, its plate-glass windows plastered over with notices announcing sale items. Young housewives and old pensioners trundled in and out, pushing carts. It was mid-afternoon busy. Not the best time for a hit, as Manolo seemed to be trying to tell Tony, pummeling his shoulder with both fists, cursing the half-assed risks they were taking. Tony was already out of the car, stuffing the gun in his pants, not even telling them who was to follow, who to stay.
He walked in the automatic door and stood near the registers, glancing around till he saw the manager. Impressive in the suit, he walked through the crowd of housewives—short-shorts and halters—and drew his green card out of his pocket as he approached the whey-faced manager. Tony flashed the card once in the fellow’s face, then slipped it back in his pocket.
“Sergeant Montana,” Tony said in a hushed voice. “Metro Dade Homicide. Looks like there’s a security problem here. We better go back to your office.”
“Homicide!” gasped the manager, as Tony prodded him down the aisle. He was shaking as if he expected to be accused of the murder himself.
They reached the cramped back office next to the loading dock. Tony closed the door behind them and drew down the shade. The manager was wringing his hands.
“Maybe I should call the district office,” he said.
Tony pulled the snub-nosed pistol from his pocket. “All right, short stuff,” he said, “I want all the cash you got. No bullshit, or I’ll drill a new hole in your head, comprende?”
“But I can’t,” the manager squeaked, looking as if he was about to fall on his knees. “It’s all in the safe. I don’t have the combination.”
“Then you better get a drill. We got all the time in the world.”
As the sweating manager rooted in his tool box, Tony bent to the floor beneath the desk and dismantled the alarm button. Meanwhile, the Marielitos had got their act together and entered the front of the store, waving their guns and shouting. Manolo was furious with Tony, but he methodically cleaned out the cash registers as Gaspar and Angel shook down the terrified shoppers. Manolo sent Gaspar out to the car with the loot in a paper bag, mostly so he could check on Chi-Chi, who looked like he’d fallen into a coma. Angel covered the clump of shoppers, an unwieldy bunch of whimpering women, as Manolo ran back to the office to get Tony.
The manager sat at his desk, looking miserable and doomed. Tony had taken the drill from him because he was so ineffectual. The safe was a joke, just a thin steel door in the wall with a flimsy deadbolt. As Manolo came racing in, the drill bit through and sprang the lock. Tony opened the door. He grinned.
“Well, well, well,” he said, reaching in for a fistful of cash.
“Tony, we can’t keep the doors locked out there. People startin’ to bang to get in. They’ve prob’ly called the cops already.”
“Relax,” said Tony, tumbling the money into a wicker basket. “This ain’t the movies, chico. It’ll take ’em an hour to get here.”
Manolo seethed and grumbled as Tony cleaned out the safe. When he was done, he reached for the phone on the desk, dialed “O”, and waited to speak to the operator. Manolo looked puzzled. “Get me the police,” said Tony into the phone, then handed the receiver to the manager. Tony winked and slipped out of the office, Manolo at his heels. “You crazy idiot,” Manolo spat at him. Tony laughed.
Towards the front of the store, he stopped at the produce section and grabbed up some peaches and apples. He stowed these in the pockets of his suit. Gaspar ordered the shoppers to the floor, and Manolo unlocked the front door. The circle of people waiting to get in fell back with a gasp when they saw the guns. Manolo held the door open, and Tony sauntered out. As his gang ran for the car, he grinned at the little crowd and reached into the wicker basket he carried under one arm. He pulled out a handful of ten-dollar bills and flung them in the air. As they floated to earth, the crowd went into a greedy scramble, fighting and shoving. Tony walked on to the car. Somewhere down the street they could hear a siren. Tony climbed into the back seat, and the Monte Carlo peeled off out of the parking lot.
Manolo leaned over the front seat. His face was red. There were flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. “What are you tryin’ to do, asshole?” he yelled at Tony. “You want to go to jail, go by yourself!”
Tony couldn’t stop laughing. He rolled down the window beside him, reached into the wicker basket, and tossed a handful of bills out into the traffic. He couldn’t stop laughing.
It was a grungy motel about two blocks off Calle Ocho. The swimming pool was green with slime. You expected to see a gang of rats sunning themselves on the patio. Actually, the rats were all in their rooms, scratching their fleas or comatose, gnawing the cardboard furniture as they waited the fall of night. Nick the Pig had lived at the Poinsettia Beach Hotel for six years, Room 9. Since he cleared about eighty thousand a month profit, he could have lived in a condo in Hallandale, with a nice view out over the Inland Waterway. But he was a very simple man, was Nick the Pig. Money meant nothing to him. The deal was what it was all about.
Room 9 smelled like the linen had never been changed since Nick moved in. Fast-food cartons and empty Fritos bags littered the snot-green carpet. Nick sat in the tiny room’s only chair, all three hundred pounds of him, counting out Tony’s money in thousand-dollar piles on the yellowed sheets. It was difficult for him to breathe. He was sweating buckets, though he was dressed in only his undershorts, as big as a tent and just as unwashed as the sheets. Tony and Manolo stood by the window, which was only open about four inches, but any air at all was better than the stink of Nick the Pig.
“Okay,” said Nick, as he finished the final stack of twenties. He reached under the bed and pulled out a clear polyethylene package of coke. He turned with a grunt and laid it on a table piled with dirty paper plates. There was a pharmaceutical scale on the table, three-posted with stainless steel trays. Tony nodded at Manolo, who crossed to the table to check the weight.
“Hey, you like Quaaludes?” asked Nick. “Real cheap. I got twenty-six thousand I gotta move today. I’ll give you five thousand for a buck and a half apiece.” He pointed across the room at a stack of cardboard cartons. Plastic bags stuffed with pills were visible in the topmost carton.
“Not now,” said Tony. They had no money left.
“Why don’t you just take one o’ them bags,” said Nick the Pig. “It’s on me. You keep it for personal use. Make the girls go crazy.”
“Thanks,” said Tony, “but I don’t use that shit.” Manolo nodded. They had a full kilo.
“Don’t do drugs, huh?” Nick was startled and very pleased. “Me neither. That’s how come I stay so healthy.” He let out a huge guffaw, shaking his jowls and his stomachs. As Tony and Manolo moved to the door, Nick waved. “Y’all come back real quick now,” he drawled. “People real hungry out there. We gotta feed ’em.”
Tony had arranged for the Marielitos to meet him that afternoon, so they
could break it up into ounces. With the last of the supermarket money, he had rented a small furnished apartment in the middle of Little Havana—an apartment suddenly vacated by a call girl whose body had not yet surfaced in Biscayne Bay. Tony had had enough of sleeping in a bunk in somebody’s sister’s apartment. In a couple of hours he had tossed out the call girl’s teddy bears, her thirty pairs of heels and her books of poetry, and installed a pinball machine in the bedroom and a stereo system big enough for a ballroom, the latter ripped off from a discotheque by Chi-Chi, in one of his rare lucid moments. The Monte Carlo belonged officially to Angel, but now that Tony had the drugs, it was at his disposal twenty-four hours a day.
They cut the coke with a base of boric acid, using for filler an inert substance normally bonded for vitamin pills. In its loose state, it had the exact look of Peruvian flake, the Dom Perignon of the coke trade. Manolo had rounded up seven dealers, all from among the Cuban ex-cons, many with years and years of drug experience. In turn, these dealers all had several contacts in the growing underworld of Little Havana. The newly arrived refugees were setting up very impressive careers as suburban burglars, bank robbers, muggers, pimps, pickpockets. They were beginning to make good money, and the first thing they wanted to do was get high.
When the dealers arrived, they were surprised to find the coke already broken down into grams. A thousand tiny inch-high bottles covered the dining room table. Tony explained that he wasn’t giving it out in ounces because he didn’t want them cutting the shit any further. It was important to build up steady customers. He wanted people to consider his product top of the line. He had learned this back in the old days in Havana, when he used to issue reefers to his dealers in the slum alleys. It was cutting off your own nose to try to pad the coke too much. Tony lectured his men with the fervor of a sales manager. He promised terrific bonuses for volume. He stopped just short of a retirement plan.
He had roughly calculated that it might take a couple of weeks to deal the whole kilogram. After all, they couldn’t sell to anyone else’s clientele, lest they make the wrong kind of enemy before they’d established a beachhead of their own. Tony knew how high the murder rate had risen on account of cocaine. Riddled bodies were always turning up in the trunks of white Eldorados. The dealers were made to understand that they had to move among their own, a gram here and a gram there, feeling their way to a market. Tony knew that a certain number of Cuban crooks were pulling off beautiful heists. The traffic in stolen cars alone had tripled in the month since the first wave of refugees was released from Fort Chaffee. Still, Tony figured it would take a few weeks before his dealers could feel them out and prick their fancy.
It didn’t work out quite the way he figured.
They moved the coke so fast, it was gone in four days. Unfortunately, so were three of the dealers. Tony had trusted Manolo’s previous relationship with these men from the streets of Havana, where Manolo had continued to run the marijuana after Tony was sent to jail. It didn’t seem that a man could disappear in Little Havana. Tony had figured that if any of his dealers tried to double-deal him, he’d track them down and blow them to smithereens. But these three were in it together, and they fled Miami altogether when they double-crossed Tony Montana. Some said they’d gone to New York. Worst of all, they got away with twenty-six thousand dollars of the coke money.
Tony was still reeling from this betrayal when the fourth of his seven dealers didn’t show up one night with eighteen hundred in cash. Manolo was sure he’d run to join the others in New York, and this was especially galling, for the man had been Manolo’s cellmate in Havana. Manolo wanted to go rough up the guy’s brother, see if they could get some information. Tony stayed calm and made a couple of calls. Around three A.M., somebody told him his dealer was down at the morgue. He’d been shot by a cop who was on the take to four different coke kings. This cop had been looking for a nice drug killing for months, just to take the pressure off. As soon as the cop found out that Tony’s dealer had no connections, the dealer was a dead man.
The cops might have even come down on Tony himself, if he hadn’t been quick to lay a couple of thousand around the district. In any case, ten days after he bought the key from Nick the Pig the dope was all gone, and Tony barely had enough cash to cover the ten he still owed Nick. His rent was paid up for two more weeks, and he managed to come out of the fiasco with a couple of thou in his pocket, but he sure as hell wasn’t the drug king he’d imagined he would be.
Anyone else might have given up right there. Perhaps the coke business was a closed system, involving so many bribes and safeguards, such an endless seesaw of loyalty and revenge, that the little guy stood no chance at all. Most other men who’d been burned like that would have had too much pride to call up Omar and ask to be hired on for another caper. Not Tony. The fate of his first kilogram he chalked up to experience. He convinced Omar that he had his organization now, available for anything. Tony was born with a deeper pride than the sort that needed swallowing. He knew what kind of men the coke kings wanted. He sold himself to Omar with that winning mix of guerrilla tough and hustler’s charm. You couldn’t turn him down.
Omar blew his nose on the other end of the line. Then he said: “Call me tonight. I think I might have something.”
Tony hadn’t had a break in weeks. The other Marielitos either got stoned, or they went with Calle Ocho women. Tony stayed clear of it all. He appeared to need nothing to stroke his ego. Thus it was doubly strange that afternoon to see him get dressed in his banker’s suit, spiffing up as if he had a date. Manolo, who lay in bed half the day drinking beer and watching the tube, asked him where he was going. Tony didn’t answer.
“Hey,” said Manolo, “you better be back by nine. Omar’s gonna be countin’ on us.”
“I’ll be back,” said Tony, closing the door behind him. Even slightly drunk, Manolo knew it was the first time Tony had ever held something back.
Tony wound his way through the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of Southwest Miami, past lookalike yards and bungalows. He kept glancing down at a scrap of paper on the seat beside him, on which was scribbled an address. The houses were resolutely neat, with plaster Madonnas in blue-shell grottos set out on the clipped Bermuda grass. Tony drew the Monte Carlo up to the curb in front of a peeling stucco cottage, with rusted screens and a cracked sidewalk and a bower of sweet magnolia on a trellis above the front door. It seemed a most unlikely place to be dealing dope or anything else.
Tony grabbed up a paper sack beside him, combed his hair in the rearview mirror, and proceeded up the walk to the door. As he rang and waited, he could see through the screen to the living room, where a waist-high black Jesus stood in the corner. Garish religious paintings were fixed to the walls. The furniture was threadbare, but the place was very clean. A stout woman with a powerful face, slightly hobbled by a touch of arthritis, came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. The setting sun was behind Tony, so she couldn’t see him clearly. She opened the screen door with a puzzled smile. She waited for Tony to speak. Then all of a sudden she realized.
“Hi, Mama,” said Tony. “Longtime.”
She didn’t speak right away. She raised a puffy hand to his face and trailed a finger down along the scar. She seemed to withdraw inside herself, though she gave no outward sign of this except for the slightest lowering of her eyelids. Then she said: “They don’t let you write in jail, huh?”
She stood aside to let him enter. He didn’t offer to kiss her, nor she him. She didn’t ask how he had found her. She’d been living here now for four years, under the name of the long-lost cousin who’d helped her flee. Tony set his package down on the sofa but made no move to sit himself. For a minute the two of them stood in silence, and perhaps it would have ended there, with him leaving his presents and hurrying away, if Gina had not come in from work.
“Whose car is that?” she called as she ran in, shaking the heat from her long dark hair.
The older woman drew in her breat
h. Tony and Gina stared at each other. He grinned. “Last time I saw you you looked like a boy,” he said.
“Tony!” she cried, and threw herself in his arms. He twirled her in a circle, the two of them laughing brightly. He was astonished by her beauty—the slim and graceful figure, the dusky skin, the large-lidded eyes. He held her at arm’s length and beamed with pride. She tossed her hair and pranced about him, just as overwhelmed as he. Their mother slipped quietly out of the room, back to the safety of her kitchen.
Tony moved to the sofa and reached into the paper bag. “I got somethin’ for you,” he said, drawing out a box with a velvet ribbon. He handed it to Gina.
“Oh Tony, Tony,” she whispered, her voice choking with tears. She fumbled with the ribbon. “I thought we’d never see you again.”
“Can’t keep a good man down,” he said, his own voice husky now. He looked gravely down at the box as she slipped the ribbon off. She opened the lid and lifted the layer of cotton. Then she gasped.
It was a locket ringed with diamonds. Tony scooped it up and held it close, so she could read the words engraved on the brushed gold surface: “Hello again, little girl.” Gina laughed through her tears as he undid the clasp and fastened it around her neck.
“Hey, Mama,” he called, “you think I forgot you?”
He fished a second package out of the bag and walked to the door of the kitchen. His mother stood at the stove, wiping the porcelain surface with a dishcloth. When she didn’t turn around, Tony undid the ribbon and opened the box. He drew out a gold chain from which hung a gold cross. As he walked to the stove she stood perfectly still. She almost seemed to flinch as he clasped it around her neck. Gina came into the kitchen laughing.
“It’s beautiful, Mama! Look at mine.” She strutted back and forth, but the old woman didn’t crack a smile. “Don’t be such an old sourpuss, huh? Tony’s home. Make him a little supper, huh?”
Gina had pressed the right button. Though Tony protested that he couldn’t stay, the old woman put the light on under the chicken and rice. Gina retrieved the bottle of champagne from Tony’s paper sack, and the two of them sat at the kitchen table, catching up. Mama would not take a glass of wine, and she wouldn’t join in on the toasts to America, but Tony could tell she was listening to everything they said.
