Cuba Libre

  There was a silence. Boudreaux waiting, his associates puffing on their cigars waiting, all of them patient about this business.

  Finally Charlie Burke said, "Sir, will you be there when we come, at your estate?"

  "Most likely, yes. If I'm not, I'll see you get your money. Now you can take my word on that," Boudreaux said, still with the nice tone, "or you can put your horses on the boat and take them home. I'll leave it up to you, all right?"

  Tyler watched Charlie Burke accept this with a shrug, twenty years ramrod of a big cow outfit, a man who never took an ugly word off any of his hands, here he was backing down from this man in evening clothes, a wave in his hair.

  Tyler said to Boudreaux, "We took your man's word we'd be paid when we got to Havana."

  "Yes, well, you have to know whose word you can take," Boudreaux said, "and whose you can't, don't you? Now if you'll excuse us..."

  Tyler said to him, "Stopping here wasn't in the deal. You'll have to pay for wharfage and feed."

  Boudreaux looked up from his map and stared at Tyler, taking his time. "Wharfage and feed. What are you saying that will cost me?"

  "Dollar and a half a head."

  "And that comes to?"

  The ma waiting to see if Tyler knew how to do his figures., "Forty-five dollars," Tyler said. And Boudreaux said, "You sure?"

  Tyler stared, keeping his mouth shut with an effort.

  Finally Boudreaux said, "Very well. Now will you excuse US?"

  Tyler touched Charlie Burke's shoulder, saying, "Let's go," wanting to leave before he did something dumb. It was the man's reasonable tone that made you want to climb over the table and hit him, mess up his goddamn hair. The man sounded like he was stating a simple fact, take his word or take the horses and go home. Wasn't that reasonable? Or saying you had to know whose word to take. How can you argue with that? It was true, wasn't it?

  Novis was holding the door open.

  Once they were in the lobby again, the door closed behind them, Tyler took his time saying, "He wants you to lose your temper and carry on, act like a fool while he stays calm and pretends to be surprised, raises his eyebrows--you see him do that?--the son of a bitch."

  Charlie Burke still seemed mystified. He didn't say a word. Tyler said, "Once we get the string to Matanzas the man is gonna pay the price we agreed on, a hundred fifty a head times thirty plus forty-five for wharfage and feed. That's forty-five hundred and forty-five dollars." He said to Fuentes, "And you get your cut out of it, that was the deal."

  "You know why he did that?" Fuentes said. "He knows what he suppose to pay, but now he sees the war coming he can sell the horses to the Spanish for twice what he pays. You understand? Do it before there is a war. As soon as it starts they take the horses from him. Also, I think because his lady friend spoke to you, Amelia, and he saw the way she acted."

  Tyler said, "It looked to me like she was being polite's all she was doing."

  "Is that what you think? Listen," Fuentes said, "Mr. Boudreaux makes sure she belongs to him and no one else. You don't believe me, ask her. She's over there with the journalist. You see her? I think she's waiting for you to look at her again."

  Chapter Six.

  THE FIRST TIME NEELY TUCKER and Amelia met--it happened to be right here at the hotel cigar countermNeely said, "I have never bought a lady a cigar before, but if I may...?" Amelia said, "You're sweet, but I prefer cigarettes." And Neely said, "Whatever pleases you gives me pleasure."

  This evening when Neely, leaning on the glass counter, said he'd never bought a lady cigarettes before, Amelia turned to him saying, "You were waiting for me, weren't you?" giving him her famous smile. Eyes twinkling mischievously, her countenance aglow, would be the way he'd write it, rather than say her smile showed in her eyes and made her seem so, well, alive. Amelia, when she wanted, could express all sorts of emotions with her eyes. Neely told her one time she could've been an actress, caught himself right away and said, "What am I talking about, could have been."

  He watched her turn to the young man behind the cigar counter.

  "You know what I like, Tony, Sweet Caporals, por favor."

  Neely struck a match and held it ready as she tore open the pack of cigarettes.

  "Rollie sees me smoking in public he has a fit."

  Neely watched her light the cigarette now, puffing away, her delicate little nostrils dilating, her pile of auburn hair shining in the lobby's electric lights.

  "You do everything he tells you?"

  "Just about. He's in there with his sugar buddies." "What're they up to now?" "The usual, making money."

  "You must know Rollie's not your type."

  "But I'm his, and that's what counts, isn't it?"

  Neely and Amelia Brown were good friends from the moment they'd started talking early last fall and would meet whenever both were in Havana at the same time. Neely loved Amelia. He thought of her as the most adorable, the most unusual--bizarre, really--and intelligent girl he'd ever met in his life. Talking to her wasn't like talking to a girl. She knew things, what was going on in the world. You could say anything you wanted to her, even slip and use curse words and she never acted shocked. Hell, she used them herself. It rankled him a little that the time he spent with her didn't seem to bother Boudreaux. The way Amelia explained it, "Well, he knows I'm discreet, and he doesn't see you otherwise as a threat."

  Neely said, "Why not?" Naturally a little hurt.

  She said, "I don't know. Maybe if you were taller."

  This evening he was curious to know what she thought of Ben Tyler.

  "Did you meet the cowboy?"

  "Ben? Yes, indeed."

  "Rollie introduced you?" "Hardly. I spoke to him though." "Uh-oh."

  "I have a new theory," Amelia said. "It isn't that Rollie gets jealous if he thinks I'm flirting... Well, he does, yeah. But he also likes to see people grovel, and if I acknowledge them, even by saying a few words, it raises their status so to speak, puts us all on the same level and then Rollie has trouble feeling superior."

  Neely loved her theories.

  "I've never seen you grovel." "No, that's why he respects me." Amelia paused as though she might explain this, but said, "You know what I mean."

  She had always been candid with Neely about her role as Boudreaux's mistress, saying it was like a free lunch, she could have anything she wanted as long as it was Cuban. Amelia lived here year-round, on the sugar estate or at the summerhouse, on the beach not far from Matanzas. They'd met on a steamer, Amelia coming to Havana on holiday with her friend Lorraine.... What Neely couldn't understand was why a girl from a respectable New Orleans family, good-looking, convent-educated, would ever consider being a kept woman. Amelia told him respectability was not an issue here, not with a mother who lived on cocaine toothache drops and KocaNola and a daddy who practically lived with his quadroon when he wasn't at the Cotton Exchange. She said, "I'm less kept than if I were married to Rollie; I can walk away any time I want." Neely said, "Are you sure?" Another time he said, "But you don't love him. Do you?" She said, "Rollie's fun." "Oh, come on."

  "I mean fun to watch, the way nothing seems to bother him. And nothing does, because whatever he believes, he considers fact, and what he doesn't believe isn't worth talking about. He speaks, Neely, and no one questions or interrupts him. But is he confident because he's rich or because he's also kind of dumb, unaware? Would you ask him that, Neely?" He did try to interview the man one time.

  "Mr. Boudreaux, sir, how can you sympathize with a regime that puts entire villages in concentration camps and is responsible for the annihilation of several hundred thousand innocent people?"

  Boudreaux's answer: he asked Neely if he was aware of the raw sewage in the residential streets of Havana; if he realized there was no ordinance requiring a householder to empty his privy vault. "No, they use it until it overflows and then hire a night-scavenger to dip the filth into barrels. But then the honey wagon bumps along the street, the plugs in the underside of the
barrels come out, and before the wagon's gone a block the street's full of raw sewage."

  Amelia's interpretation: "He's saying this indicates the Cuban people are lazy and irresponsible, therefore harsh measures are sometimes required to govern them."

  Neely tried another approach. "Mr. Boudreaux, you represent the main reason the United States could shortly be at war with Spain, and that is to protect American interests here in Cuba." It was meant as a question even though it didn't sound like one.

  Boudreaux said, "Mr. Tucker," in that soft way he spoke, "if what you say is true and you were a soldier in the army of the United States, you think I would expect you to be willing to give your life for my personal interests?"

  Amelia's comment: "You bet he would. Except Rollie wouldn't care who wins, Spain or us. Either way he'll still be sitting on top. Rollie's fear is the Cubans will end up running their own country, the Creoles and all those black people who used to be slaves. He knows they wouldn't put up with him."

  Neely had interviewed people on both sides of the insurrection. Mlximo Gomez, the leader of the insurgents, the "Chocolate-colored, withered old man" the New York Herald said looked like an Egyptian mummy. During the two months Neely spent with Gomez's troops his camera, his razor and a pair of lace-up boots disappeared.

  He had interviewed Calixto Garcia, the insurgent field commander with the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, put there years ago when he shot himself in an attempt to avoid capture. A Spanish surgeon saved his life and Garcia wore the wound stuffed with cotton.

  He had interviewed a British military observer, a young subaltern named Churchill who had high praise for Cuban cigars but not much to say about the tactics of this war: "If the Cubans wish to convince the world that they have a real army, they must fight a real battle."

  Neely had interviewed Spanish generals and naval officers. Most recently he'd interviewed Captain Sigsbee and survivors of the Maine disaster and had told Amelia about the marine at San Ambrosio who stared without moving or speaking, in total shock from the blast. He was arranging to have a chat with Clara Barton, here representing the American Red Cross on behalf of the reconcentrados. But the person he'd rather talk to than Bill McKinley or the queen regent of Spain was Amelia Brown.

  She'd say, "Why? I'm not news."

  No, but she had met just about everyone in Cuba who was and her air of insouciance talking about them was fascinating. He asked her, "What do you think of Fitz?"

  General Fitzhugh Lee, American consul here in Havana, former Civil War hero and nephew of Robert E. "He's fat," Amelia said. "That's all?"

  "He told me he thinks the Maine was blown up by a mine that was the work of a few, quote, 'malicious individuals." Interesting? Not unlike saying some naughty boys did it. He also believes that nearly every person born on this island is instilled with a dislike of the Spaniards and their methods. Even, he said, those born of Spanish parents."

  Interesting.

  Another one. What about the former captain-general, Weyler, known to one and all as "the Butcher"?

  "He has rather soft blue eyes for a Spaniard."

  "Really."

  "He asked me to leave Rollie and go to Madrid with him. I thought about it--I've never been to Europe."

  "Amelia, the man's a monster, the most bloodthirsty military leader in recent history."

  "I didn't go, did I?"

  Neely would tell her that one of these days she actually would become tired of Rollie and leave him. "Then what will you do?"

  "I haven't thought about it."

  "When you were a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

  "I'm still a girl, Neely. I'm only twenty."

  "How old?"

  "Does it matter? What you're trying to say is, didn't I dream of becoming something more respectable than a courtesan, a rich man's girlfriend? Well, yes, I could see myself married to someone like him, but would I be better off?"

  "Could you see yourself married to an ordinary working man?"

  "Well, not if he's just ordinary. What would be wrong with his having money? The question is, do I want to marry someday and have babies? I don't know. I guess I've never thought about it."

  The feeling Neely had, he wouldn't be surprised to see Amelia step out of some type of cause clbre incident and become world-famous overnight.

  "In the company of a visiting dignitary," Amelia said, "when he's assassinated, shot through the heart by an anarchist, and in the photograph you see his blood all over my white organdy tea dress."

  Neely said he had in mind something more on the order of what Mr. William Randolph Hearst did with Evangelina Cisneros in the Journal.

  "Invented her," Amelia said.

  "Well, she did exist," Neely said. "They found her in prison awaiting trial for rebellious actions against the state." "Or was it for not going to bed with the alcalde?" "Amelia, there was a worldwide petition to get her out, 'the beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter of the revolution languishing in Death's Shadow," Casa de Recogidas, the vilest prison in all Cuba. Julia Ward Howe said, "How can we think of this pure flower of maidenhood condemned to live with felons and outcasts, without succor, without protection'... something about 'under a torrid sky, suffering privation, indignity"

  "How do you remember all that?"

  "It didn't do Evangelina any good at all. Spain wanted to send her to an even worse prison, in Africa. So one of Mr. Hearst's boys helped her escape."

  "You mean," Amelia said, "he paid off the guards and she walked out."

  "They made it look like an escape--it's the same thing. The beautiful Evangelina was escorted to Washington, where she was received by President McKinley..."

  "Julia Ward Howe singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic'?"

  "Possibly. The president, anyway, and one hundred thousand cheering Americans."

  Amelia said she never thought Evangelina Cisneros was that good-looking. Neely said, well, she wasn't bad.

  This evening at the hotel cigar counter Neely said, "You know something? I would rather write about you than Julia Ward Howe."

  "And Clara Barton?"

  "Even Clara Barton, and there's a good story there. The Red Cross has brought in so much condensed milk for the starving children, some of the Cubans are selling it to buy cigars. Oh, and before too long I want to interview that insurgent leader they call Islero, I'm told a very colorful character." "Colorful meaning colored?"

  "That's right, Islero is pure Negro, a slave at one time, before he ran away to become a bloodthirsty bandit and evolved, finally, into a moderately famous insurrectionist. He's known as the Black Death. Or it might be the Black Plague; now I'm not sure."

  "What about the cowboy? He might be interesting," Amelia said. She turned from the cigar counter. "He's right over there as we speak."

  By the dining room talking to his partner and Rollie's man, Victor Fuentes, the cowboy looking this way as Fuentes said something to him. Amelia smiled and watched him touch his new panama.

  "I already know a few things about him," Neely said. "One, he was born and raised in your hometown, New Orleans."

  "You made that up."

  "Lives in Arizona now. He's been to prison." "Really. What did he do?" "Robbed banks."

  Amelia said, "Oh my," her eyes shining.

  It wasn't more than moments later Lionel Tavalera, in civilian clothes, a black suit, walked past them from the hotel entrance and started across the lobby. Neely saw him first. He said, "Well, look who's here," fairly sure Boudreaux knew him, and maybe Amelia did too.

  She said, "The major himself," sounding surprised. Because of the way he was dressed, or being in this hotel, or what? They watched Tavalera walk up to Ben Tyler and begin talking to him.

  Neely said, "You do know Lionel, I take it."

  Amelia, staring across the lobby, said, "I watched him kill two men."

  "My God--where was this?"

  "I'll tell you about it sometime."

  "Lionel and some h
ussar officers," Neely said, "had a set to with the cowboy this afternoon. According to Charlie Burke one of them was interested in buying a horse. He asked the cowboy to saddle it for him and Tyler refused. What he said was, "I'm not your mozo.""

  Amelia drew on her cigarette, inhaled and blew out a slow stream of smoke. She said, " "I'm not your mozo," huh?" watching Lionel Tavalera coming back this way now with a set expression, walking past them toward the street entrance.

  "It doesn't appear," Amelia said, "anything was settled, does it?"

  "Meanwhile," Neely said, "Tyler and his friends are repairing to the bar. Did I notice him looking this way? Certainly not at me. I'm going to San Ambrosio tomorrow to check on the marine, see if he's regained his speech. If you'd like to come..." He let it hang and said, "You're right, it's not settled," as Tavalera came back past them accompanied now by a young man with a pointy mustache, also in a black business suit. They crossed the lobby toward the bar.

  When Amelia didn't comment, Neely said, "That, speak of the devil, is the hussar officer, Lieutenant Teobaldo Barban, who asked Tyler to saddle the horse for him. Tyler is said to have replied, "What's the matter, you helpless?""

  "Well, naturally," Amelia said, "since he isn't his mozo."

  "You like that, don't you? Remember last month I did an essay, "For Honor's Sake: The Rites of Duello'?"

  "I recall your working on it."

  "That's what I mean; it hasn't run yet. But Teo Barban was my main source. I asked him what it was like to call a man out, point pistols at each other and, under quite formal conditions, shoot the man through the heart."

  Amelia said, "Why don't you accompany me into the bar."

  There was no question in Neely's mind, Teo Barban was going to walk up to Tyler and demand satisfaction, lay down the challenge to meet him in the morning with pistols. It was what this young hussar officer had done successfully three times since arriving in Cuba. There was a story told about a New York correspondent who offended or insulted Teo in some way. When Teo's second presented the challenge the correspondent said, "I'll fight the don if he can prove he's white and has at least two clean shirts." But when Teo sought out the correspondent he was told the gentleman had been called back to America.