Then the investigation itself commenced, and Earl was surprised to learn that despite Lane’s prediction and Roger’s warning, a stop on Zanja Street didn’t turn up the first day, or the second, or even the third. What happened instead proved less an investigation than a sightseeing tour, well-fortified by huge rum drinks with little American flags on toothpicks stuck in pieces of pickled pineapple, melon or whatever. The boss had several of these an hour at this spot or that, and his face turned redder and his hair whiter. Other than that it was cruising. The boss was driven about slowly, seeing the sights, admiring the women, checking out the casinos.
They did the big downtown joints first, old and distinguished, the pleasure palaces that made Cuba in the twenties and the thirties and the forties and now, in the fifties, such a destination. In Old Havana the Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore on the Prado, then over to La Rampa, where the Hotel Nacional, the Hotel Lincoln, the Hotel Capri all clustered, like Spanish castles, usually white and tall and flanked by trees and elaborate gardens just off the broad avenues of the most modern section of the city. The casinos themselves followed, such as the Tropicana, the world’s biggest and most beautiful nightclub, and the less imposing but still beautiful Sans Souci, all in the section called Centro, clustered in the same modern downtown that could have been Cleveland with gambling. In these joints, the layouts were the same: the gaming room with its busy sense of drama, the wide esplanade where a pool of aquamarine water glinted in the sun and waiters plied the bathers with elaborate fruit-and-rum concoctions, the nightclub and bar, with a stage and always a vast bar.
Boss Harry was always expected. A senior executive waited, and an attending staff. There were many pretty women, flashy and fleshy, as if that too, were a coinage all knew the boss to enjoy. Usually, a tour ensued, and the boss and his party were taken from the big gaming rooms to the nightclub to the backstage area, where in the day the behind-the-scenes theater world seemed stale and filled with sad odors. Then they moved to the pool, usually overlooking the sea, where hundreds of vacationers lay out cooking in the sun, trying to turn brown in a basting of cocoa butter or Coppertone. When recognized, as happened more than a few times, the boss generously mixed with the common or not-so-common men, shaking hands, posing for pictures, holding babies. You’d have thought the man was running for office of mayor of Havana or something.
Another day there’d been a long, larky drive out La Quinta, as the broad Fifth Avenue was called, as it ran along the North Coast, a two lane road with parklands between the lanes, where lights gleamed and trees rose. They passed through the section called Miramar, and went to the famous resort at La Playa, next to a Cuban version of Coney Island, complete with rides and freak shows, as if the city itself weren’t already a freak show. At La Playa, a big do was thrown. A later stop took them to the Havana Yacht Club, the greyhound races nearby and then even further inland to the Oriental Park, a racecourse where in season the swells went in straw boaters and white linen suits to throw money away on the ponies. Now, however, it was not in season, and only a skeleton crew of lackeys awaited the great man, to show him what he wanted to see.
“Noticed any gangsters, Earl?” Lane said at one point.
“There seem to be some slick fellas watching us,” said Earl. “If they’re gunmen or pimps or hooligans or grifters, I couldn’t say. But in places like these, they watch hard.”
“Well, what I see,” said Lane, “is people having a good time, having some fun. I don’t see no gangsters. Earl, I think you’ve been reading Dick Tracy in the funny papers.”
Lane in all matters seemed to know a little better than Earl, as if he were afraid anything Earl might say could impress Boss Harry and in that way damage his own position as the boss’s no. 1 boy.
“Now, Lane, you listen to Earl,” said Harry. “He’s fought gangsters toe to toe, isn’t that right? He cleaned up Hot Springs. Didn’t stay clean long, but he did the job up fine, as my friend Fred Becker tells the story. Ain’t that so, Earl?”
“We fought ’em but it did seem they got that town up and running again fast after the shooting stopped,” was all Earl could admit, for he had dark superstitions that moneys were paid and that some of Arkansas’s most distinguished sons—like the heroic Hot Springs reformer Fred Becker, who rode his victory to the governor’s mansion, and the wise and compassionate Harry Etheridge, congressman and Washington kingmaker—all somehow turned out the richer for it.
And now finally, on the night of the fourth day, they had descended to the lowest of the low, to the lower end of the seventeen blocks of Zanja Street, where everything was cheap and easy. The long byway carved a streak through Centro, aiming toward the far more elegant Prado, but where the Prado made many think of Paris, Zanja made men think only of sex. It was lined with bodegas, fruit stands, old women rolling cigars at card tables along the street, lottery agencies—the town seemed washed in numbers, testament to the greed that lay everywhere—bars and tabernas, nightclubs of smoky reputation, a mess of open-air Chinese restaurants just off the main drag, the mysterious doors in which a single square hatch opened, a man was examined, then admitted—and of course the Shanghai Theater.
They pulled the big Cadillac slowly over the cobblestones and the building itself came into view.
“I do believe we ought to take a look-see,” said the boss.
“Might never get a chance like this again.”
“Driver, did you hear?” Lane, sitting next to Harry, asked.
“Si, Señor Brodgins,” said Pepe, a sergeant in the police seconded to chauffeur’s duty. He pulled the car over not far from the destination.
“Earl, you go on in and make sure it’s safe, now, you hear?” said Lane.
Earl looked at 205 Zanja on the shabby whore street whose washing of pastels only emphasized its crummy squalor, and saw just a big theater marquee with TEATRO SHANGHAI lit by orange lamps so that it had a lurid blood glow to it. Chinese symbols ran down the wall flanking the ratty entrance on either side, also orange in the lamplight. One of the lamps, however, was somehow miswired, and it flickered and crackled and nobody had gotten around to fixing it yet. Like a broken radio, it leaked hiss and sputter into the night, while it pulsed orange weirdness across the land.
Earl looked at Lane, bathed in the orange light so that he seemed to be an ice cream treat. Lane nudged him forward with a little shooing motion of his eyes. Earl got out, slipped toward the theater, and stepped in. It was shabby inside as out, and seemingly deserted, and a small box office under a sign in Spanish (but with $1.25 clearly marked) stood toward the rear. But it smelled not of popcorn but of disinfectant, and soon enough a fat Cuban came to him with a hand out for the buck-two-bits, and Earl just flashed the big automatic in his shoulder holster, as if to say, I am here to see what I will see. The man melted away, smiling broadly and insincerely.
Earl stepped through a curtain and into a darkness. He was aware of other men in there, an immensity of them, row after row after row, silent and transfixed, and the smell of more disinfectant, and in the glare of the screen he could see the men staring, unmoving, unbelieving. He looked up. In bold black and white a woman in a mask seemed to have something in her mouth and be working it easily, and it took a little while for Earl to put the details together and then he realized what she had in her mouth and that she herself wore only stockings and heels and that flabby immensity to the left of the screen was her big butt, inelegantly parted, revealing in its flaccidity that which should not be revealed. He recoiled, stepped back, and looked away from the screen.
Jesus Christ, don’t this take it all! This old coot come a thousand miles from Washington, D.C., to look at a smoker on a movie screen in a theater.
He looked around and realized the place was full and the other watchers in the dark wouldn’t be paying any attention to anything except what was on screen.
He slipped back out to the car.
“It’s okay. The boys are watching the movies and the movies aren’t like nothi
ng playing in Washington, D.C. Mr. Congressman, you sure you want to go into this place? It don’t smell very clean.”
“Why, Earl, I must go where duty takes me.” And with that he rose into the orange electrical glow, and with Lane hustled into 205 Zanja.
Earl smoked an orange cigarette and blew orange smoke while the boys had their fun. They were in there for almost an hour while he lounged on the fender of the Cadillac, and eventually, they came out.
“Ain’t never seen a thing like that. Where do you suppose they find the gals? Earl, you are a po-liceman. You would know such things. Where would they find the gals?”
“Them gals looked pretty broke-down to me,” Earl said. “Old whores, can’t walk the streets no more, don’t know nothing else, that’s what I’m betting.”
“Whoo-ee,” said the boss, “that was a thing to do, and now I am all up and ready for the next step. Shall we see what other adventures we might get into?”
Earl knew: he was looking for a woman. He said nothing to express his discomfort, but kept looking back, his eyes flicking quickly to the rear as he examined what lay back there.
“We being followed, Earl?” Lane wanted to know.
Earl wanted to say yes, for he felt something. A presence, an attention, something somehow concentrating on them. But it was only that feeling and that alone; nothing emerged to his vision to confirm the suspicion.
“I don’t think so,” said Earl. “But if we are, he’s a damn better man than I am.”
“Didn’t think there were no better men than you, Earl.”
“There’s plenty. But no, I don’t think there’s anyone back there. Maybe it’s just my old imagination heating up.”
“Earl, have a drink, relax. A little drink wouldn’t harm you a bit.”
Actually, Earl knew it would. He be back on the bottle full-time.
“No thank you, sir,” he said to Lane.
Earl checked the rearview mirror again just in case. No, nothing. Here, in this human tide of hustlers and grifters, whores and low-rent crime dogs, it was the bottom of the Havana pool. It reminded Earl a little of Hot Springs in 1946, that sense of a town gone mad for pleasures; but the Spanish twist to it also called up Panama City and its whores’ paradise from 1938 when he’d done a tour down there, and every weekend the boys would head off for cheap beer and cheap women. Earl was no saint; he’d had a big share of each on the principle that if war came he’d not survive it and so he should take what he could buy now. He had no regrets, but now, married, with several wars under his belt, he somehow couldn’t connect with it. He didn’t need it.
“Now there,” said the boss, “goes a right fine piece of pootie.”
She was a right fine piece of pootie, too.
“She sure is,” said Lane. “Yes, sir, that she is.”
“Si, señor,” said Pepe, who immediately got what was going on.
“Is she a nigra, do you suppose, Lane?” asked the boss.
“Well, sir, she does have a caramelly skin and that behind of hers shakes just like a negro gal’s. I’ll bet she rattles around in bed like a negro gal, too. Don’t you, Earl?”
Earl had examined the flowing clothes of the señorita only briefly, pausing not at the quivering abundance of the flesh of shoulders and rather awesome breasts, nor at the undulations of high, proud buttocks, nor at the firm, luscious legs held just so tensely atop a pair of spindly black heels, for he had ascertained that so dressed, she probably didn’t conceal a machete or a hand grenade, and had passed on to other concerns.
“Yes, sir,” said Earl, in his dullest cop voice.
“Let’s see where she goes,” said the boss, still consumed by the presence of the undulating brown woman. “Just, you know, for the damned heck of it.”
“Yes, boss.”
The car oozed down the narrow street, over ancient cobblestones laid by slaves in the previous century or two. Lights danced or sparkled, illuminating the brown flesh.
The woman, all ajiggle on staked heels and thongs that cut into her ankles, at last found her destination, and saucily halted. She turned to confront the men in the close-by Cadillac, and threw a lascivious wink right at the boss. Then she opened a door bathed in red light, and slipped inside.
“Boss, I think she likes you.”
“I think she do, too. Don’t you, Earl?”
Earl thought: she’s a whore. She’s paid to like you. That’s what whores do. That’s why they’re whores.
“She looks available,” was all Earl could think to say.
“Pepe, you pull over here. You follow her up, Pepe, and see what’s what. You give me a good report.”
Pepe started to get out.
“Now hold on, sir,” said Earl. “Mr. Congressman, this is not a good idea. This here is a very tough part of town, that I know. That gal is a whore, sure as rain and heat. You don’t know who’s up there, some pimp fellow with a knife, some robbers, it’s all the kind of thing a man in your position cannot be involved in, let me tell you that. Nothing here for you but bad trouble, sir.”
“Now, Earl,” began Boss Harry, but it was Lane Brodgins who took over.
“Damn, Swagger, it ain’t up to you to judge and call shots. This here is a United States congressman and he will go and do as he pleases and your job isn’t to second-guess him but to make goddamn clear and sure he is safe. That is your only job, goddammit.”
“Earl, you go with Pepe and you see what’s what. We’ll wait here. Pepe, come here a second.”
The tough little Cuban leaned close, and Harry whispered something in his ear. Pepe nodded sagely.
Earl didn’t say a thing. Didn’t seem like there was much to say. His hand fled to the big Colt Super .38 resting in the holster hung under his left shoulder, to remind himself, yep, it was there. Then he went along with Pepe, under the glow of the red bulb, and watched as Pepe knocked. In time, a small square hatch in the door opened at eye level, and someone examined them from within, up and down. Then the hatch snapped shut, the door opened, and in they went.
Chapter 9
Speshnev never followed directly. He had learned that lesson the hard way, in Barcelona, in 1937, when two members of the Anarcho-Syndicalists had observed him, counter-ambushed, and sent him crawling through the alleys with a Luger bullet in his belly.
So he ran his operation carefully using classic technique, drawing on a hundred years of tsarist and Cheka-NKVD collective espionage experience. He still did the small things well. He never went out of town. It was impossible to follow on the dusty Cuban roads. But in Havana, it was different. He trailed by taxicab, but never directly. Sometimes he paralleled, other times, if streets were busy, he crosscut and switched back. He had a bagful of hats and changed them every hour, from the white straw boater so popular in the streets to the more elegant felt fedora, to a shapeless straw rural head cover, to, finally, a red bandanna, knotted tightly about his head. He never wanted to stay in the same profile. He had two ties and a bolo, which came on or off as circumstances warranted; his jacket too was on or off, buttoned or unbuttoned, collar up, collar down. Then, at random hours determined by predesignated unpredictables—like the appearance of a pigeon with gray wings, or of a rare woman seller of bolita tickets (as the unofficial lottery was called)—he’d abandon the cab he was in, or he’d make a guess as to destination based on good professional instincts, and zip ahead, not to follow them but to foreshadow them.
It was expensive, of course; too expensive for the annoying Pashin, who would not cover the taxi expenses, would not hire a car and driver, yet would not alter the nature of his assignment either. Make do, Speshnev. You are supposed to be so good, simply make do.
So early in the mornings, when the congressman and his more interesting companions had tired out, he went to a smallish casino, lost a little money playing blackjack, and then, when the decks were charged with face cards, made a swift big hit, pocketed the excess and left. He never hit the same place twice, he never wore the same hat twic
e, he never won too much to get himself beaten or robbed. He just knew the numbers and held them in his mind with an eerie concentration, made his profit, and retreated quickly, before he became known, before his card-counting could be classified a professional’s skill as opposed to luck. He’d already made $10,000 that way, in a few nights. It was a shame he didn’t defect, he thought, and make the numbers work for him in the world’s gambling spots.
But fool that he was, he did his duty, for men who despised him, for a system that had almost murdered him, for cynics and scoundrels and sociopaths that ran the intelligence service. His duty: it was all he had.
He followed them for the better part of a week and had reached some kind of provisional judgments already. The first was that the American congressman, showy and vain about his hair, was a man of great strengths but equally great weaknesses. The man was a drinker and if Speshnev still had instincts for such things, a whoremonger as well. He loved to dominate and to be obeyed and he sat back and watched people scurry, enjoying every second of the theater of fear. Of those around him, most were of the sort familiar in political circumstances: little factotums who did what the Great Man ordered and sought to acquire his favor and avoid his rage whenever possible. An assistant seemed to be the chief of these pathetic creatures, and he never ventured far from the Great Man’s elbow, which made him the prime subject of those compliments and those terrible rages.