Scarface

by Paul Monette

  Elvira appeared in a couple of Equity-waiver plays, which meant she didn’t get paid. The productions took place in spaces that didn’t even look like theaters. Forty folding chairs were grouped around a makeshift set, and hardly anybody ever sat in the forty seats. But Elvira managed to meet a lot of feisty independent girls, and they helped her get a portfolio together and introduced her around to the modeling agencies. Now and then she’d land a couple of hours work and actually get paid, but nothing ever really led to anything concrete. More often than not the agencies told her she was too pretty. Pretty was not the right type that year.

  So she hooked a little. The girl she shared the apartment with on 59th and Second Avenue introduced her to the man who ran her “agency,” an outrageous queen who looked and acted like Divine out of drag, whose name was Norman Desmond. Norman set the girls up on very Class A dates—the theater, dinner at Sardi’s afterwards, and then a couple of hours’ sex in a midtown hotel, usually the Hilton. Elvira always wondered if Norman didn’t have a contract with the Hilton. The john paid a hundred and twenty-five, of which the girls received seventy-five. This was in the late seventies, when three hundred a week still bought you some time.

  Elvira hooked maybe twice a week, and the johns were as predictable as the Hilton. Midwest; in for a convention; got it up fast and popped their load in ten minutes. It was very, very easy. But Elvira also had dates of her own on Friday and Saturday, with powerful men who worked like bandits in the cul-de-sacs of Manhattan, managing real estate and making book and selling information. Men who weren’t exactly gangsters but just about. They took her out very fancy, to hundred-dollar dinners and dance places that didn’t even open till two A.M. A weekend went on all weekend.

  And she didn’t really drink much. Just a beer. Just a double Stolichnaya on the rocks, which she sipped all night. But she did try a little cocaine when they had it. She never took as much as the men did, and anyway she didn’t like the way it made her nose run. She hated being hung over. But the thing about cocaine was this: though people always said it was libido-suppressive, it made Elvira horny. The weekend men were very aggressive types, and they wanted to jump into bed three or four times a day, as if they had to make up for lost time. Elvira tended to feel smothered by all that desire, abused even. But if she tooted a little coke she figured what the hell and went in for some kicks of her own.

  By the time she was twenty she’d become aware that certain girls in the actress/model class had made it to the top. They no longer needed a waitress job on the side, and they even stopped hooking except for an occasional regular. Luck and the right connections had led them into modeling gigs where they could pull down five hundred dollars a day. They no longer had to rely on their Saturday dates to provide them with cocaine; they had their own supply. These were girls who had come to the city at the same time Elvira did, and somehow they’d gotten ahead of her.

  She began to get impatient, panicky even, fearful that she might end up just another hooker. Her roommate, only three years older, no longer even talked about actress/model matters. Hooking had ceased to be part-time. Elvira began to look at herself in the mirror and wonder if she was losing her looks. How long did pretty last anyway? Twenty-five? Not thirty. Deliberately she began to cast about for a way out. It was time she found some security. She zeroed in on her johns and Saturday gangsters, looking for a proper situation. She fantasized about finding one who would set her up in a swank apartment and be away on business two out of every three weeks.

  She settled for Harry Sullivan, mostly because it got her out of New York, which had come to seem like a dead-end trip. Harry was a Hollywood producer. Though Elvira could never get it clear what he was a producer of, there being no correlation between the projects Harry talked about and what actually opened in theaters and showed on CBS, still he seemed to have a lot of money. And though he was manic and a lousy drunk and his skin was pocked and he bragged too much, he had a passion for “saving” girls like Elvira. He whisked them away from the hand-to-mouth and the degradation of whoring. He kept them safe in his house in the Hollywood Hills, coddling them and showering them with gifts.

  Why not? Elvira knew it wasn’t going to be forever. She knew she was only the next in line in a man’s elaborate dream-life; but then, that’s what a pretty girl always was, in her experience anyway. At least she didn’t have to deal with Norman Desmond any more. And once she moved to Los Angeles and Harry gave her her own gold American Express, she was doing a hell of a lot better than seventy-five bucks a throw. Harry only required it once a week, and he didn’t even have any kinks to speak of.

  It was practically a dream come true, except for one thing. She missed the cocaine. Harry was pushing forty-five, and he was a drunk of the old school, Irish and red-faced. He didn’t indulge in the white lady, and neither did his old-school friends. Not that Elvira couldn’t live without it; not that she was an addict or anything. Cocaine wasn’t heroin. It was simply her drug of choice, and she found she missed the couple-of-grams-a-weekend men she used to see in New York.

  And in spite of the Spanish bungalow with the oval pool and the drop-dead view of the city lights, in spite of Harry’s Eldorado and the charge account at Neiman’s, Elvira began to see that, by Hollywood terms at least, Harry Sullivan was middle-middle at best. She watched the pretty girls—no prettier than she—exit the stretch limousines and enter the swank restaurants, laughing and tossing their sunstruck hair. Elvira felt the same pang of distance that she used to feel in New York when she caught a glimpse of a star model ducking into Studio 54—the signature models, rich and free, with faces kings dreamed of. But whereas in New York there was always the chance that the next connection would land her in clover, in Hollywood she was just another housegirl, wandering around a swimming pool. It was worse than being married, if she wasn’t going to be very rich.

  It was around this time, as she turned twenty-one, that she started to call herself Elvira Saint James. She had never felt the need of the nine generations before, but now she figured a measure of class was every bit as important as pretty, especially if she meant to find a zillionaire. In the back of her mind she decided she would probably do best with somebody even older and more old-school than Harry. As long as he had a fortune that could choke a horse, it didn’t matter how middle-middle he was at heart. Thus she began to flirt boldly with Harry’s set, casting about for the right situation.

  At the same time she reactivated her modeling career. Harry wouldn’t have allowed her to do it for the money, but she convinced him she simply needed to get out and do something—anything. She had a whole new portfolio made up, and she carted it around to the agencies and soon lucked out with a lucrative stint as a hand model, painting her nails for a TV spot that flashed her image into millions of homes for weeks on end, though only as far as her elbows.

  But it wasn’t the work that drove her. She wanted to get back in the hustle, meet the girls who were trying to break in, find out who they were dating. Within a month she was part of a nice little group, and of course they introduced her to their coke connection. It was as natural as sharing the name of one’s hairdresser, or one’s gynecologist. And anyway, Elvira didn’t spend very much, only what was left over from what she made as a model. Say a gram a week. It took the edge off the weekend nights, when she went out to long dreary restaurant dinners with Harry and his friends from the slow lane.

  For a while it worked very well, this living a double life. She spent her days with the girls and her evenings with Harry and never really had to be alone. She’d always hated to be alone. The only problem was, she wasn’t in love. Listening to the other models spill their stories of the men who obsessed them, the ones who fucked them over and the ones who swore they’d kill them if they looked at another man, Elvira wondered if she hadn’t made a secret vow against love as well as marriage. Every other pretty girl she met was a deep romantic, with one eye always on the door, waiting for her prince to come riding in. Elvira hated to th
ink she was a cynic. She was sure it was only that the right man hadn’t come along yet. She more or less hoped he’d wait till she’d got herself settled down with a rich man. She was certainly too much a realist to suppose the prince and the zillionaire were one.

  Six months later she was up to two grams a week, still a very manageable amount, and in any case the dealer wasn’t out to screw the girls. That is, he was out to screw the girls, but not out of money. He sold them snow at eighty dollars a gram, a good twenty-five percent below retail, and all they had to do was go to bed with him now and then. Elvira didn’t mind a bit, since sex and cocaine went together so well. “Like gin and tonic,” she used to tell the other girls. And the dealer liked her attitude so well, he began to give her Quaaludes free.

  She started to sleep like a baby.

  Unfortunately, she also started to fight with Harry. She made scenes at the table in the boring restaurants, disdainful of all that sloppy Irish drunkenness. She flirted with every man who looked twice at her, just to get Harry upset. And he wouldn’t fight back. He developed a wounded, long-suffering look like a beaten puppy, and the more Elvira raged and threw tantrums, the more did Harry shower her with middle-middle presents. He begged her to tell him what she wanted.

  She wanted a better deal. She was sick of everyone and everything, and the only thing that made sense any more was her temper, which flashed like a brush fire at the slightest provocation. She blew up at salespeople and sent the maid away in tears. She stalked out of a restaurant in Beverly Hills one night, flinging a drink in Harry’s face just because he happened to ask her why she kept going to the bathroom. It was none of his goddam business. If her dealer was feeling romantic and wanted to lay a free gram on her, why shouldn’t she blow it all in one night?

  She didn’t even bother to retrieve her coat as she left the restaurant. She hurried away along Rodeo Drive, high as a kite, convinced she would never return to Harry Sullivan again. You had to close a door before the next one opened. By the time she reached Wilshire Boulevard she realized she didn’t need anything but the clothes on her back and the half gram in her purse. It was as if she was daring the world to show her something new. She’d cut her losses, just as she had in Baltimore and later on in New York. She’d never felt as free as she did that night.

  She stood on the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo, waiting for the light to change. A limousine drew up at the curb beside her, its windows black and impenetrable. Suddenly one of the windows purred open, and a dark-eyed man with bushy hair, exuding money and power like radiation, leaned out and said: “You need a lift?”

  “I’m not hooking, if that’s what you mean,” said Elvira.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not paying,” said Frank Lopez with a grin. “But you look like you need a lift. How far you going?”

  Elvira gave a short laugh. “About a million miles,” she retorted dryly.

  “Now ain’t that a coincidence,” he said, swinging the door wide. “So am I.”

  Even as she ducked inside she knew it was not about love, not for her anyway. The moment she laid eyes on him she knew he would fall in love with her. It might have seemed appropriate to wait a little bit, having just walked out on Harry not fifteen minutes before. But she knew instinctively that Frank Lopez, whatever else he turned out to be, would never be middle-middle. And though she didn’t expect to love him, it didn’t mean she didn’t want him. For there was an immediate chemistry between Elvira and Frank Lopez, and not just of the carnal sort. She smelled the cocaine on him ten feet away. He might not be a prince, but he sure as hell had a princely stash.

  He was there in L.A. trying to set up a distribution scheme, since Hollywood was the next stop for much of the coke that funneled through Miami. The scheme didn’t take; the action in coke was still fundamentally local, outsiders not welcome. So the only thing Frank had to show for the trip was Elvira Saint James. She really meant it when she said she was free to go. She did not have to stop anywhere and pack a suitcase. She didn’t have to make a phone call or arrange to sublet her apartment. She left L.A. without a backward glance.

  They’d been together two and a half years now. He loved her as much as she’d thought he would—no more, no less. He was crazy busy setting up his empire, and he only really needed her when the rest of it got to be too much. Which wasn’t very often, and usually involved a week’s vacation—baking in a boat off Eleuthera, pouring money down the drain in Vegas, buying up half Manhattan. Day to day, mostly they stayed out of each other’s way. They went out on the town at night, but only from eight to eleven. Elvira had safe men—colleagues of Frank’s, the occasional gay tennis pro—who squired her around if she felt like dancing late.

  But they did enjoy what they gave to each other, and they savored it more and more, the longer they were together. To Frank she was like a goddess. She spent her beauty recklessly, and she left a trail of gold when she walked. She worked on that; she made it happen. Hours she spent perfecting her beauty—her hair, her skin, her clothes, two hundred pairs of shoes—and because he loved the movement of her, she walked beside him in a trance of sensuality.

  What he gave her was the money, the chance to indulge without limit. Without even the limit of decency.

  They were thus the perfect couple the night that Tony walked into their lives.

  Chapter Five

  MIAMI INTERNATIONAL WAS having a bad day. A torrential rain the night before had caused considerable runway flooding. The winds were gusting heavily in the west, and there was a wind shear alert off and on all morning. The planes inched along through two-hour lines. A DC-10 bound for Houston had just been commandeered by a Cuban national with a bottle bomb. He wanted to go back. The air conditioning had broken down in the International Arrivals Building, and when they finally got it back in service after three and a half hours, they managed to short the computers at customs. It took triple the time to check a passport.

  Pan Am 91 from Bogota was two hours and sixteen minutes late landing. The lines at customs snaked a hundred yards down the halls. Tony Montana, in a three-piece silk-and-linen blend, with a diamond on his little finger, kept glancing down at his watch, almost as if he was timing something. He carried a brown glove-leather attaché case, chock full of invoices that proved what line of work he was in. He was the epitome of the young ethnic American businessman, heavily into import-export. On the way up, of course.

  At last he stepped up to the counter, where a chunky, sullen customs officer gave him a frigid look. “Mind opening that, sir?” he said. The “sir” was in quotes.

  Calmly Tony zipped open the attaché. As the officer probed among the papers, Tony glanced at the next line over. A fat woman pushing a baby carriage had just stepped up to the counter. A squalling child with a toy panda sat in the carriage. The officer waved them through without even demanding to look in the woman’s purse. Behind her was a nun in a full white habit, holding all her papers neatly in one hand. She too was waved on through. By this point Tony’s official was ransacking the attaché, trying to find a false bottom. Of course there was none.

  At last the official looked up, seemingly annoyed not to have turned up any contraband. He handed Tony a slip of paper on which his rights were printed, and then he said: “Would you please step into that room over there, sir?” Tony sighed wearily. An old man on crutches was waved through the line right behind him. An armed customs agent came forward and escorted Tony into the interrogation room.

  He was asked to strip for a body search. As he removed the fifteen-hundred-dollar suit, they asked him questions about his four days in Colombia. He answered flatly, as if the whole thing bored him. He stood there in his underpants while the sub-agents went through his pockets and felt along the seams. They tapped at the heels of his shoes, looking for a hollow spot. The interrogating agent couldn’t crack his alibi. The import-export papers were all in order. Reluctantly they handed him back his suit, and Tony asked cheerfully: “You sure you don’t want to stick your fingers up m
y ass?” Nobody laughed.

  Tony left the interrogation room with a wonderful spring in his step, as if he’d just gotten a clean bill of health from his doctor. He didn’t seem bothered at all by the long wait. Neither did Manolo, who sat reading the papers in Omar’s Cadillac, the radio and the air conditioning turned up high. When Tony got in, they drove back to Calle Ocho, now and then laughing out loud at how easy it all was.

  They parked in front of a nondescript little bungalow, the yard overgrown with crimson poinsettias. This place had been Omar’s stash house for almost two years, which practically qualified it for a brass plaque above the door. A stash house was usually good for about two months. Omar admitted them, puffed with pride, as if he’d just negotiated a dangerous run from Bogota himself. His woman was cooking a big celebratory supper in the kitchen, and the smell of spicy Cuban food permeated the house.

  In the living room, waiting patiently for Tony’s arrival, were the fat woman with the baby carriage, the nun, and the old man on crutches. Tony and Manolo sat on the sofa, and the mules handed over the goods. Manolo used his pocket knife to rip open the panda, while the little kid shrieked in protest. A candy bar was produced to mollify him. Half a kilo was tucked in the panda’s belly. Tony, meanwhile, was methodically dismantling the baby carriage. The aluminum handles were hollow and filled with coke in long plastic tubes. Omar knelt in front of the old man and carefully sawed through the cast on his leg. A kilo was banked and padded along the inner face of the plaster. The nun slipped out of her habit like a stripper. Two kilos were strapped to her body.

  The fat woman took the diapers off the baby, revealing a thick packet of the drug that had come through unscathed, in spite of the wet. The ex-nun had now moved to her suitcases, where she unpacked half a dozen crude religious statues. Tony gathered up the painted ceramic virgins, carried them into the bathroom, and smashed them in the tub. Then he lifted the bags of cocaine out of the rubble. By the time they were done, they had eight kilos stacked on the coffee table in the living room. The mules were each paid five hundred in cash and told to report again the following Monday, when they would be issued their tickets back to Colombia, this time to smuggle out dollars.