by Paul Monette
“What was that all about?”
“Scum put Mel Bernstein on me,” Tony said. He headed back to the table, Manolo nervous beside him and firing questions. “Had to be Frank,” said Tony. “Who else knew about the Rebenga hit? Omar’s fertilizer, ain’t he? Frank’s just lettin’ me know what kinda weight he can pull.”
Manolo was actually sweating, as if he’d been dancing all night long. “I don’t know, things don’t look so good here, Tony. Why don’t we put off the Panama deal. Get outa town for a while, y’know, go up to New York?”
Tony shook his head. “Too cold. I like the weather here.” Suddenly his eyes darted to the edge of the dance floor, where Gina and the burgundy suit were arm in arm and laughing as they headed up the stairs to the lounges. Abruptly Tony stood up from the table.
“Where you goin’ now?” asked Manolo, bewildered.
Tony didn’t answer. He strode across the dance floor, knocking a couple of people out of his way, who swore at him as he gained the stairs and barreled up two at a time. He reached the landing, but neither Gina nor the burgundy suit was visible. Tony plowed right into the ladies’ room. Several women ducked or dove for the stalls, as if they were used to jealous lovers spraying the powder room with bullets. In a flash Tony could see that Gina wasn’t there, and he stormed out as suddenly as he’d stormed in.
He crossed the hall to the men’s room and threw the door open. Three men were lined up at the urinals, minding their own business. There were two stalls at the end of the room, and under the door on the left two pairs of feet were clearly visible, a man’s and a woman’s. Tony raged across the room and hit the door with his shoulder. It crashed open, revealing Gina just as she was about to snort a spoonful of coke. The burgundy suit stood behind her, running his hands along her ass and kissing her on the neck.
They were both thrown off-balance as Tony exploded into the tiny space. Gina screamed. With a single blow to the head Tony dropped the burgundy suit to the floor. He began to kick at the guy’s face.
“Tony, stop!” she cried. “What are you doing?”
He whirled around and grabbed her hand. “What am I doing? You goddam whore, what do you want with this shit, huh?” He ripped the vial of cocaine from her fingers and scattered the drug all over the floor of the stall. Then he dropped the vial in the toilet. The burgundy suit had scrambled to his knees, and with one hand Tony lifted him onto his feet. He was chalk-white. “You get the hell out of here, maricon, I’ll kill you the next time!” Then Tony threw him out of the stall, and he tripped and fell heavily against the sink, splitting his lip open.
“Fernando, don’t go!” cried Gina. She began to beat at Tony with her fists.
Tony turned and pinned her against the wall of the stall. Fernando crawled to his feet and staggered out of the men’s room. Everyone else had already split. Manolo now rushed in.
“You think it’s cute, huh?” sneered Tony, holding her as she struggled and tearing the crepe at her shoulder. “Somebody puttin’ their hands all over your ass in a toilet. Is that how you want to grow up?”
“It’s none of your business, Tony,” she spat at him.
“The hell it isn’t! Three-dollar hooker, that’s all you are! Snorting shit like the rest o’ these pigs!”
Manolo hovered at the door of the stall, trying to quiet them down. The owner would probably be up in about two minutes, and they’d already had enough trouble.
“What are you, a priest?” shrilled Gina. “A cop? Look at your life, Tony. You can’t tell me what to do!”
Manolo said: “Let me take her home, Tony.”
Tony seemed shocked by the savagery in Gina’s voice. He loosened his grip, and she slipped away from the corner. He probably would have let her go without another word just then, but she wasn’t finished. Taunting and contemptuous she said: “I’ll go out with who I want, Tony. And if I want to screw them I’ll screw them.”
His face went pale with outrage. He lunged at her and smacked her face. She tried to run across the room, and he dragged her back by her hair. She tripped and fell in a heap, sobbing. Tony stood over her, desperate and confused. Manolo pushed him aside and knelt to console her. Now the door to the corridor was opened gingerly, and the maitre d’ stuck his head in.
“Get her outa here,” said Tony to Manolo, his voice cracking with something like grief. And he walked away, shoving the maitre d’ aside as he exited into the corridor. The little crowd of spectators parted to give him room.
Gina did not stop crying till Manolo had taken her down the back stairs to the parking lot. He settled her into his Cadillac and headed for Little Havana. He couldn’t think of a thing to say, and he made it clear by his mildness that Gina owed him no explanations. But once the tears had stopped, she spoke in a voice taut with anger: “He’s an animal, isn’t he? Mama’s right. He hurts everything he touches. I don’t care if I never see him again.”
Manolo said with a shrug: “He loves you, what do you want. You’re his kid sister.”
“He still thinks I’m fifteen, doesn’t he? Just because he’s been in jail for five years. Can’t he see I grew up?”
“You’re the best thing he’s got,” said Manolo gently. “He don’t want you to grow up to be like him. So he’s got this father thing, wants to protect you . . .”
“Against what?” she retorted irritably. She pulled a brush from her bag and began to stroke her hair. It crackled with electricity.
“Guys like the jerk you were with tonight.”
“Don’t you start now, Manolo,” she said. “I like Fernando, he’s fun. Knows how to treat a woman.”
Manolo looked pained. “Come on, Gina, what kinda future’s he got? He’s a bum. You oughta go out with a guy who’s goin’ somewhere.”
She gave him a peculiar look. “Like who?” she said carefully.
“I don’t know. Doctor—lawyer—that kind.” He eased the Cadillac next to the curb in front of the bungalow. His face crinkled up in a friendly smile as he reached across to open her door.
She grabbed his hand. “What about you, Manolo? Why don’t you ever take me out?” He let her hold his hand, but his face reddened, and he looked away. “I see the way you look at me,” she said. “How come you don’t ask?”
He chuckled nervously. “Hey, Tony’s like my brother,” he said. This wasn’t really an answer. Perhaps what he meant to say was that Tony wouldn’t like it. Considering what a lady-killer he was at the Babylon Club, his shyness was startling, though no less endearing for that.
“You think about it, okay?” said Gina, raising his hand and kissing the tips of his fingers. “ ’Cause I’ll tell you something, Manolo. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
She slipped out of the car and hurried toward the house. As he watched her fumble with her key in the yellow porch light, he felt an awful sinking in his heart. He had loved her since the day she came in laughing to visit Tony. And he knew that Tony would not allow it. It frightened him to have to keep secrets from Tony, almost as much as Tony himself had begun to frighten him, with all his deals and his hunger for power.
Manolo would have been quite content to be a smalltime hood, living his life in a quiet bungalow like this one, curling up with a girl like Gina. Instead, wherever Manolo looked they seemed to be in way over their heads. The money was big, all right, but the simple life he harbored deep inside receded further and further with every passing day. He drove away heartsick, convinced that no matter how successful he and Tony became, he would never have what he really wanted.
When Manolo moved to take care of Gina, Tony walked downstairs again and headed for the bar. He had been through three interruptions now—Mel Bernstein, Elvira, and Gina—but he was no less intent on talking to Echeverria’s men about the situation in Panama. The two were sitting just where they had been, nursing their eighth or tenth Dos Equis of the evening. They greeted Tony warmly, for Echeverria, their boss, had been one of Tony’s marijuana contacts in the old days in Havana
. They regaled him for ten minutes with their exploits on a trawler full of fifteen tons of weed. They weren’t cokeheads, they were potheads, and thus they were mild and rather befuddled, gentle as golden retrievers, at least among friends.
Tony began to question them about Panama customs. His first shipment from Sosa would arrive in Panama City in the next three days. Tony would fly in and set up the mules. He had a list of about fifteen names, local Panama hoods who would find him mules by the truckload. Apparently there wasn’t a soul in Panama who wouldn’t sell it for five hundred dollars. Tony ran through the list with Echeverria’s men, feeling them out about each of the gangsters, finding out who he could really trust. Customs, it seemed, was no problem. There were three or four men who had to be bribed, and by international standards they were still refreshingly cheap.
Tony loved this part of an operation, the trading of information and the sizing up of men. His own personal problems seemed to vanish, at least insofar as they took the shape of Bernstein, Elvira, and Gina. Just then he was sure he could handle all of them, Frank Lopez as well. He felt this assurance much more acutely when he wasn’t actually facing the people themselves. By working on his power base, by getting his deal to run without a hitch, he was building himself a position in which all personal frictions would naturally resolve themselves. It was as if he thought he could drown them in champagne.
In any case, he was feeling on top of the world by the time he had worked his way around the bar, talking with this one and that one. The men in power were eager to talk to Tony Montana, who’d struck a new kind of deal in Bolivia. The hustlers wanted to bask in the glow of his self-assurance. It must have been after two when he finally went back to his empty table to have a last drink.
The dancing had stopped and the band packed off, but the night wasn’t over yet. The night was never done at the Babylon. To the lush strains of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night, the deep-tanned owner appeared on the stage, picked out by a pin spot. He tapped his microphone and said: “Are ya all high enough?” A wave of cheers and applause rose from the darkened restaurant and bar. “Good, good. ’Cause we got something real special for you. We found him stoned in the jungle, and we’re sending him back right after the show. From Caracas, Venezuela, ladies and gentlemen, we present with great pride”—a roll of drums—“Octavio!”
The spotlight shifted and picked up a sad old man at the corner of the stage, enormously fat, with a Quasimodo mask covering his head and neck. The coked-up audience broke into rhythmic applause. Many of them were from Caracas themselves and knew the act backwards. With a red bulb for a nose, the fat man gyrated grotesquely to the Sinatra song. The crowd began to laugh, and the music suddenly shifted beat to Saturday Night Fever. Octavio began to shimmy, shedding the stuffing out of his clothes, his big eyes staring mournfully.
Tony watched in a kind of brooding silence, all alone like the clown himself. Octavio tore his head mask off, revealing a young white-painted face with large blackened eyes. The crowd was laughing, and in fact the gyrations were very funny, but there was something hypnotic as well about his dancing, some deep ritual yearning. He was stripped down to leotards now, thin as a stick, and he began to pull girls out of the crowd to dance with him. They bounced around like yoyos. Everyone was laughing except the clown and Tony.
As he watched the figure of mockery, the pin spot shining on the sad white face, Tony began to feel a sort of prickly heat at the top of his spine. The disco beat was frenetic, the whole room caught up in hilarity. And yet there was another rhythm here, moving in the darkness. Tony cocked his head, as if he didn’t quite believe what his antenna was picking up. He caught a glint of metal out of the corner of one eye—
And suddenly dove for the floor.
Machine-gun fire ripped through the upholstery just where his torso had been, smashing the mirrors behind the table. The crowd erupted in screams. Tony rolled and grabbed for the Baretta at his ankle. He knew he was hit in the shoulder. He lunged under a table as the bullets kept coming. He could tell from the spurt of fire there were two of them. He got off a shot and hit one of them in the chest. The gunman staggered across the disco floor, spraying the walls and ceiling with a final volley as he fell.
The crowd exploded for the exits, trampling one another. The second gunman was crouched behind an overturned table, trying to pick off Tony as he scrambled behind the bar. A wounded woman in the middle of the floor was screaming, and the maitre d’ was pleading for a short cease-fire so they could drag her to safety. But they weren’t playing by the Geneva conventions. The gunman sprayed the fleeing crowd with bullets, as if to make them exit even faster. Tony popped up from behind the bar and fired twice, hitting the gunman in the hand, which made his trigger finger wilt.
Tony bolted for the door. His tuxedo seemed to be in tatters, his left side drenched with blood. Dozens of partygoers had taken cover in the foyer, but most had already fled into the night. Tony ran out crouched, holding his shoulder. He sprinted across the parking lot to the red Jaguar, praying the keys would be in the ignition. He was just reaching for the door when another burst of fire off to his right made him duck. There was a third gunman across the way, standing beside a black van. Tony fired his last shot and made the guy sprint for cover.
Then he tumbled into the Jaguar, reached under the seat, and pulled out his Ingram pistol. The key was in the ignition. It flashed through Tony’s mind how dumb these hitmen were not to strip his car. He gunned the engine and lurched across the parking lot. As he passed the main entrance to the club, the man he’d wounded in the hand was running out. He got off a wave of bullets, but they ricocheted off the armored side of the Jag. Tony roared out into the street.
Or course the van came after him. Tony could see it in the rearview mirror, about a block behind him. It had stopped to pick up the second gunman, who now leaned out of the passenger’s window, waiting for a shot at Tony. Both cars ran a red light, then another. Luckily the streets were quiet because it was so late. The van was souped up like crazy, and it was gaining. The gunman fired a volley, trying to explode the Jaguar’s rear tires.
The bullets reverberated along the armor plating, till Tony’s teeth were rattling in his head.
The two cars were nearly abreast when Tony took a corner on two wheels. A wino was just stepping into the street, and Tony hit the brakes and swerved to miss him. The front bumper of the Jag bashed the van. The gunman was struggling to put a new clip in his gun. The Jag and the van shrieked down the street, the van edging over to ram the car again and again. Tony pulled a lever, and the bulletproof blackout shutters whapped down across the side windows. The van was trying to cut him off, push him onto the sidewalk. The gunman aimed his fresh-armed Ingram and blasted out Tony’s windshield.
The Jag leaped the curb and careened down the sidewalk. The van slowed to watch him crash, but Tony kept his hold on the wheel. He drove the car onto the street again. He tapped the lever, and the blackout shutters whirred partially open. As the van came abreast of him, Tony laid the Ingram across his arm and sprayed the field with lateral fire. The gunman in the passenger’s seat ducked, but the driver wasn’t so lucky. His head exploded like a watermelon. The van went berserk, roaring across the street and up the sidewalk, smashing through the plate-glass window of a hardware store. It burst into flames.
Tony was a mess, and so was the car, but he couldn’t stop here. He cut away from the main drag and headed back to Calle Ocho along quiet suburban streets. The hole in his shoulder wasn’t going to kill him, but it hurt like hell. He couldn’t go to a hospital—too many questions. He didn’t dare go home, since he couldn’t be sure they weren’t staking it out. He decided the only safe place was Nick the Pig’s.
It took him a good half hour to get there. Most of the cuts on his face and hands—from the blowing of the windshield—had stopped bleeding. Even so, he looked like he’d lost a fight with a grizzly bear. His shoulder slumped as he staggered out of the car. His white tuxedo shirt had tur
ned a ghastly crimson. When Nick opened the door to let him in, wearing only a pair of drawers the size of a tent, Tony pitched forward into his arms, as if he’d finally reached a place where he could let go.
Nick carried him over and laid him down on the sofa. It was quarter to three, but he made a couple of calls and managed to have a med student there within half an hour. As the student cut Tony’s tuxedo off and began to dress the wound, Nick called Chi-Chi and Martin Rojas and told them to report to his place pronto. Tony sipped at a glass of hundred and fifty proof rum. He was weak from loss of blood, but the wound wasn’t deep. The bullet had gone right through. Even as the student stitched him up, he was on the phone trying to track down Manolo.
At first he wasn’t certain they hadn’t got to Manolo first. There was no answer at the apartment. He called a couple of dealers who worked for them, and they managed to come up with last names for the girls Manolo was seeing. A couple of dead ends, till finally a girl named Miriam answered and said: “Yeah, he’s here. Who’s askin’?”
When Manolo grabbed the phone, Tony could tell he was wired on coke. As soon as he heard what had happened, he freaked out. He clamored to apologize, like none of it would have happened if he hadn’t left Tony alone.
“Look, chico,” said Tony, “just get your fancy clothes on and meet me outside the bakery in forty-five minutes. Now move your ass!”
He hung up the phone and grunted as the med student pulled the last stitch. Nick the Pig paid the student four grams and let him out just as Chi-Chi and Martin arrived. Tony got dressed quickly in the clothes Chi-Chi had brought. His face was slightly pale, and he winced as he slipped on the shirt, but he was as ready to go as ever. Revenge was a wonderful cure.
“I’m bettin’ he’s not heard anything yet,” he said to Nick. “Gimme forty-five minutes, then call him. All you say is you’re one of the guys at the club. Say you just heard about the van, and the word is I got away.”
“No problem, Tony.”
