Heart pounding, head resting lightly against the thin white plasterboard wall, Meadows weighed his next move. He studied the people entering and leaving the other three rooms, his vision constantly intercepted by the swirling mob of mourners in the hall. He had to hurry; Nelson would be worried. He must have been here nearly twenty minutes already. He looked at his black-faced Rolex—a perfect mourner’s watch. Four minutes had passed.
“You don’t look Cuban,” she said.
Meadows turned quickly, startled by the intrusion. “I’m not,” he blurted.
“I know. I can always tell; something about the eyes and the set of the head.”
Frank black eyes stared appraisingly at Meadows. She was even more beautiful than the dolphin lady. She wore a dark blue suit of superb cut and a white silk shirt, knotted in a loose bow at the neck. Her taste identified her to Meadows as an outcast.
“Pretty awful, isn’t it.” It was not a question.
“Yes,” said Meadows. “Oh, yes.”
“They’re ‘doing’ my aunt’s friend in there.” The shiny black hair tossed at the room Meadows had assigned number four.
“A rosary. I couldn’t stand it—the hypocrisy. My aunt hadn’t spoken to the woman in ten years, except to say nasty things. Now she’s in there weeping over her Ave Marias.”
Meadows nodded. The child in number one, the aunt’s friend in number four. Two down, two to go.
“My name is Sofia,” the girl said.
Meadows mumbled something sibilant.
“Steven?” the girl asked.
“No, no,” Meadows said quickly, casting frantically for a name. “Sean,” he said in desperation.
“Where do you come from?”
Oh, Christ.
“Akron,” said Meadows. “Akron, Ohio, heart of the Midwest.” Why doesn’t she go away and leave me alone? he thought.
“That’s nice,” the girl said uncertainly.
Meadows could see she didn’t think it was nice at all. He was delighted—he had never been to Akron.
“What do you do for a living, Sean?”
Why doesn’t she let up? Another time, another place, señorita.
“I’m in floor covering.”
“Is that interesting?”
“Oh, yes,” Meadows said in desperation. “Fascinating. People don’t realize just how important the choice of a floor covering can be. Color, texture, resiliency. Things like that make the environment and can influence one’s view of oneself and society.”
It was a speech he had heard once from a gay decorator, but it worked. Meadows had her now. He watched the smile fade, the eyes glaze.
“Yes, well, I have to go,” she said. “Hasta luego.” And she was lost in the crowd, fleeing not only the rosary now but also asbestos tile and wall-to-wall carpeting.
Meadows pushed off the wall and headed for room number two. He didn’t have to go in, and he cursed his stupidity. A black-bordered plastic wallboard, the kind in which skinny white letters were inserted one at a time, bore the name Don Richard Lorenzo Edwards de Gutierrez. This had to be the Anglo-Cuban Nelson had told him about. A nameplate would be outside all the rooms; he should have looked.
Meadows took a deep breath and pushed open the door to room number three. Mono’s room.
Mono lay in a rich brown casket draped with a banner that said Brigada 2506, a tribute from the Cuban exile brigade whose invasion had failed at the Bay of Pigs.
The casket was open. Mono wore a white suit. His eyes were closed; his mouth was composed, his hair, neatly combed and lacquered in place. To Chris Meadows, Mono looked cruel even in death.
There were fewer people in this room, perhaps a dozen in all.
Meadows wondered which two worked for Octavio Nelson. There was no sign of the thugs Meadows sought.
He should have left then. But as his eyes cast about the room they fastened suddenly on three young boys, the eldest about ten, who fidgeted on hard-backed chairs in the row closest the coffin.
Three children. Sweet Jesus! Why did Mono have to have three children? Meadows grabbed at the moan, but some of it escaped into the quiet room. It might have been a sigh, a cough, a clearing of the throat, a calculated permission-to-enter? I-have-come-to-mourn-him-too.
Heads turned. Meadows felt himself go pale. Mono’s widow— who else could it be?—rose stiffly from her chair and turned to face Meadows. Ten years ago she might have been pretty. Traces of insouciance lingered in a face traced now by tears. She had grown dumpy, afflicted by the sagging breasts and rice-and-beans ass that are trademarks of Cuban women over thirty.
“Ay, ay, ay,” the widow keened as she approached Meadows.
“No, no,” Meadows gasped.
It must have sounded to the widow like a murmur of sympathy. She embraced Meadows, crushing him tightly against her. Meadows could hear the dress fabric groan as she smothered him. He could feel her girdle and her thick thighs. He could taste her tears. It was like being hugged by a bear. Meadows dared not tear himself away. He stood perfectly still, unwitting and unwilling comfort to the new widow.
Over her shoulder the sewn-shut eyes of the dead killer vowed retribution.
Later Meadows would never be able to recall how he had extracted himself from the widow’s cloying embrace. His last memory as he rushed from the body room was the image of the three young boys, staring wordlessly at him.
Meadows bolted into a neutral passageway to collect himself. He heard the sounds of plates, the whoosh of an espresso machine. Nelson’s words returned to him: “…best sandwiches in Little Havana.” Why not, if people mourned all night? Why not food in a funeral parlor?
The lounge was bright and airy: a half dozen wood veneer tables, a display case with cold drinks, a coffee machine and a cash register, its ring discreetly muffled. One Cuban waiter in a tuxedo stood behind a counter, gracefully carving a thick leg of pork. At the espresso machine a second waiter argued with a mourner.
”¿Cómo que no hay cerveza?” the mourner demanded.
“Lo siento, señor, pero no tenemos aquì.”
Beer. The thought of a sparkling cold glass of beer tugged at Meadows’s throat. How nice it would be. He shared the mourner’s disappointment. If there were sandwiches, there also ought to be beer.
Then Meadows’s thirst vanished, and his heat leaped into his parched throat at a vision from the dog track.
The mourner was one of Mono’s thugs.
Meadows looked hard: ferret’s eyes, small, bulbous nose, ginger mustache, sharply etched cheeks meeting at a small mouth with big lips. Stocky build, about twenty-five, dark complexion. As the killer turned from the waiter, Meadows’s portrait was complete. The man’s left ear was deformed: a cauliflower ear. Meadows pictured the man in boxing trunks, a welterweight.
Meadows signaled the sandwich maker. “Cafecito por favor, y agua,” he said slowly in gringo Spanish.
The killer walked slowly toward Meadows’s table. Meadows watched anxiously through fingers of a hand thrust quickly to his forehead, as though to massage it. Cauliflower Ear passed without a glance and went to sit at the table nearest the door. Meadows was committed now; there was no other way out.
When the waiter brought the coffee, Meadows swiveled slightly for a better view and was rewarded. Mono’s second assistant was sliding into the spindly chair across from Cauliflower Ear.
“El viene,” the second man said.
A thrill ran through Meadows. “El viene.” He is coming. Who is coming? Who would drink coffee with two killers at a funeral parlor on this particular night? El Jefe. Nelson had been right.
Swiftly Meadows registered the second killer. By the time the man had lit a filtered cigarette with a gold Dunhill, Meadows could have drawn him in his sleep: older than the other one, about thirty-five, and bigger. Massive shoulders, about twenty pounds overweight, black hair thinning, round cheeks, pronounced brows, bad teeth, sallow complexion, peasant’s hands, obsidian eyes that showed little intelligence. Hi
s nose had been broken and badly set. Funny, Meadows thought, the boxer’s nose is not broken, but the peasant’s is.
A dapper, well-dressed man of about fifty entered the lounge. His gaze swept over Cauliflower Ear and the Peasant. Meadows tensed. This was it. Here was el Jefe. He began filing the man’s features away in his memory. Then the dapper man moved on without speaking and ordered a sandwich. Not him after all.
A woman entered; then another man. Neither paid the slightest attention to the two killers at their table near the door.
Meadows felt himself becoming angry. Come on, come on, dammit. I want out of here. How long can I nurse a two-ounce cup of coffee? To relieve his tension, Meadows rose from the table and took a soft drink from the glass-front display case.
When he turned to walk back to his chair, el Jefe had arrived.
Could it be? Meadows sat down, stunned. The man standing over the table, lecturing the killers in soft, rapid-fire Spanish, was the matinee idol with the rose in his lapel that Meadows had seen in the hall.
Fragments of the monologue drifted to Meadows’s table. His disused Spanish strained to translate. He hunched forward, trying to hear. He caught a word here, a phrase there. But there was no mistaking the tone. El Jefe’s anger was written on the Peasant’s furrowed brow and in the right foot that Cauliflower Ear tapped nervously on the linoleum. Neither uttered a word.
It happened very fast. To a casual observer, the three men might have been exchanging the time of day. Without knowing what to listen for, a passer-by would have understood nothing. There was no greeting. Meadows didn’t get it all, but he heard enough. There could be no mistake.
“Mono was a fool…Not the Colombians, I promise you…The Colombians will soon work with us…”
After what could have been no more than ten or fifteen seconds, a rising commotion drowned the diatribe. Everyone in the lounge heard a thud from the hallway. A woman screamed. Men’s voices rose in alarm and confusion. Then came the staccato tat-tat-tat of a woman running on high heels. Meadows overheard only one more chilling phrase: “That business down in the Grove was stupid.”
In that instant a well-dressed woman burst into the cafeteria, cast frantically about with wide eyes, caught sight of el Jefe’s back and screamed, “¡Venga! Rápido. Es Doña Ines.”
In those terse moments with the thugs the man with the rose had seemed wild, atavistic. Then, as Meadows watched in amazement, his features rearranged suddenly into a mask of suave concern. It was an extraordinary performance. That face in place, el Jefe turned to meet the distraught woman and quickly left the room.
At their table, the Peasant ground his cigarette into the floor and stood up sharply.
“Fue el gringo. Vamos a visitarlo.”
As the killers left without paying, Meadows felt the aluminum of the soft-drink can begin to yield under the pressure of his grip. It wasn’t hard to figure out which gringo they were going to visit.
Still, it was not so bad, Meadows reasoned. An hour or two at the drawing board, and all three men would come to life. With the sketches Nelson would have all he needed. The killers would be in his pocket then, and el Jefe would follow.
The crowd in the central hallway had resolved itself into a babbling knot around what Meadows presumed was an old woman who had collapsed. He slipped through the door without trouble, curiously elated and pleased with himself. Caught in a terror not of his own making, a pawn—to use Nelson’s term—Meadows had acquitted himself well. He had what Nelson wanted; in fact, in one macabre interlude he had achieved more than Nelson and all his professional pawns.
He had found el Jefe. There could be no thought of any criminal charges against Meadows now. He had done his job. The rest was up to Nelson. Meadows would go away for a few days, and when he came back, it would be all over. He searched the street in both directions—above all, he didn’t want to bump into the killers now—and walked across the intersection to the darkened gas station where Nelson was waiting.
But Nelson did not wait there. There were only the broken pumps, a pregnant gray grimalkin and the smell of decay. In agitation Meadows walked to the corner. He found only a faceless line of traffic.
A squall sprang out of the night sky, and Meadows huddled in the doorway of a bakery. He waited there for what seemed a long time, but Nelson never came.
Chapter 14
T. CHRISTOPHER MEADOWS lay in a coffin of burnished wood. His flesh was as white as talcum, as rigid as steel. The mourners came in solemn procession. “So young, so sad, so tragic,” they said, and each laid an empty cup of Cuban coffee on the coffin lid. The lawman came late. A tarnished star glinted from his forehead. He leaned close, and when he thought no one was looking, he ground his cigar into the corpse’s folded hands, just to be sure.
T. Christopher Meadows could feel the pain, just as he could smell the yellow roses and hear the empty lamenting and see through lids sewn closed by a mortician’s apprentice. But he could not move. He could not even cry. The lawman watched expressionlessly as the cigar burned the white flesh with the smell of embalming fluid. He shrugged. “Adios, amigo,” he said, and tossed his cigar on the teetering mountain of empty cups.
The widow wept. She wore a black bikini and the white peaked cap of a pilot. “Ay, ay, ay,” she wept, and embraced the mourners in turn, tight, grinding embraces that climaxed when the widow directed each mourner’s hand to her firm cocaine breasts.
The man with the shark eyes came from the espresso machine to say the rosary. “Gringo, gringo, gringo, gringo, feenesh, unlucky gringo, feenesh.” Blood spewed from his coffee cup and gave birth to a whirlpool on the corpse’s chest.
The mourners never understood that the shark-eyed rosary man was the killer and the corpse his victim. They watched without comprehension while a gust of indifference toppled the mountain of coffee cups and they fell, one by one, into the whirlpool. Taxi! cried the corpse. I must get away. Why are there no taxis in this fucking city? Taxi! Taxi for a gringo. Please.
Meadows awoke with an erection, every pore open. The pale blue sheets clung to his body. His mouth felt like steel wool. Flares of pain chided his intemperance with every blink. A breeze had sprung up off the sea, rattling the Venetian blinds. That was what had awakened him. Rattling blinds, toppling coffee cups. Meadows shivered.
Meadows rolled out of Terry’s bed, heading for the shower. El Jefe, the Peasant and Cauliflower Ear hated him from the wall opposite the bed where he had pinioned them with thumbtacks. Again, Meadows shivered. No more pisco, he promised himself.
The empty bottle of the deceptively clear, seductively smooth Andean aguardiente lay at the foot of the kitchenette table where Meadows had worked through the night. He had drawn to remember, and he had drunk to forget. As he’d done so, a part of Meadows’s brain had analyzed the Gothic night with the myopia of a jeweler assaying a gem. Every analysis had floundered on the same unanswerable question: Why had Nelson left him?
Meadows’s new-found assurance had dissolved in those first few minutes outside the funeral home. He was alone. What should he do? Was he still a fugitive from a murder charge? Where should he go? Not to the Buckingham, surely. He couldn’t go home. The Peasant and Cauliflower Ear had gone home. Should he try to leave Miami? He could, but if he was a fugitive, the police would be watching. That left Terry’s apartment on Key Biscayne. It was the only refuge he had.
In a city notorious for its poor public transportation, Meadows had walked the rain-fresh streets for twenty minutes in search of a cab. Taxis do not cruise in Miami. They lie in wait. Meadows had found one, finally, in front of a hospital. He pounded on the window to awaken the driver, who, faithful to the tradition of all Miami cabdrivers, switched on the meter before unlocking the door to let him in.
Why, Nelson, why? He had asked himself that a hundred times that long night. He found no answer now in the finely chiseled features of el Jefe on the paper before him or the finely numbing lash of the pisco in his gut.
After he
had showered and jolted his quarreling nerves with black coffee, Meadows examined the three sketches again with a critic’s eye. He was pleased to see that neither confusion nor alcohol had cheated his skill. The broad-faced ferret looked exactly as Meadows had seen him: huge, stolid and dumb. The dominant pug characteristic had come through nicely in the second sketch, the head half turned to show the cauliflower ear.
The drawing of el Jefe was the best of the three, Meadows decided. Breeding, distinction, magnetism were all there. The deep-set eyes promised depth and intelligence. The mouth was a trifle too small, though, and not sensual enough. Meadows fixed it.
Then he tried to call Terry to say he was using her apartment. She lent it out sometimes, and the last thing Meadows needed right now was a gaggle of South Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the great PX in the north.
Predictably Terry was nowhere to be found, and the secretary at CAN’s main office in Asunción, Paraguay, seemed even thicker than usual.
“When will she be back?”
“Long time no back.”
“Tell her to call Chris at her house.”
“What her house?”
“Su casa está quemada,” said Meadows, summoning his best Spanish and hanging up in disgust.
Meadows washed the dishes, made the bed, threw out the dead bottle of pisco, found Terry’s keys and coaxed life from the old clunker Ford she kept in the building garage—just in case. Then he went back upstairs, drank a glass of ice water and realized suddenly he had nothing to do. He tinkered with the sketches. He turned on the television and turned it off again quickly. He tried to read. Terry had a good collection of Latin American literature, and Meadows picked up an English translation of Garcia Márquez’s short stories. The Colombian wizard’s sense of timelessness suited Meadows’s mood perfectly, but he tossed the book aside after a few minutes. He had enough mythical reality of his own to cope with just then.