Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (11 page)

“
Guapísima,
” Quinn said. “I don’t recognize you. Gorgeous.”

“I am never the same, even when I am not somebody else.”

“I think I may have to memorize that. You’re a blonde.”

“It’s a wig.”

“It’s a good one. I thought you had gotten it bleached.”

“Now we must get you a necktie.”

Newly garbed, they rode the elevator to the Montmartre’s second floor and stepped into a foyer of full-length mirrors, the vitalizing rhythm of a mambo drifting in from the nightclub on the right, and the clicks and bells of slot machines on the left beckoning arrivals toward the roulette and blackjack tables in the casino beyond. Renata took Quinn’s arm as they went into the nightclub, which shimmered in black and chrome, its mauve curtains billowing on the elevated stage, its tables filling up. When Quinn pointed to Alfie at a center table two tiers up from ringside, the maître d’ led them to him. Before they were seated Alfie had a waiter filling their champagne glasses.

“Hey-soos Maria,” Alfie said as the newly designed Renata sat down; and his eyes said the rest. Another scalp in her saddlebag.

“Good table,” Quinn said, changing the subject.

“They know me. The place will be packed by eight and it stays that way till four a.m.”

“I always liked this club,” Renata said. “I’m sure I sat at this table when my sister sang here.”

The lights and the piped-in mambo went down abruptly and a voice boomed through the speakers, “
Damas y caballeros,
ladies and gentlemen,
el club Montmartre presenta la Orquestra de Bebo Valdés!
” Billowing curtains receded, twenty musicians on stage erupted with a magnified mambo that was quickly joined by twenty mulata dancers moving to the feverish beat with their feathers, flounces, ruffles, spangles and vast expanses of flesh, and the pulse of nighttime Havana skipped a syncopated beat.

Quinn was still finding it difficult to realize that he was actually a player in this manic culture—across the table from him a woman of hyperventilating beauty with rebellion running in her veins, and a loner hoodlum who peddles tools of psychotic vengeance to suicidal rebels. Keeping with this improbable beat he told them about Cooney’s challenge to Hemingway.

“Viva Cooney,” Renata said. “I’m on his team.”

“I’ve read Hemingway,” Alfie said. “He knows guns. Cooney’s in trouble.”

“Would you really arrange it?” Renata asked.

“Why would Hemingway even consider this? And why involve me? He’s got a brigade of acolytes. But if he really does ask me to arrange the duel of the century, I’ll do it, and put you both on the weapons committee.”

“You should set it up in Madison Square Garden,” Alfie said.

“Cooney’s not a contender,” Quinn said.

The steaks arrived and at mid-meal the headwaiter came over to Alfie to whisper the buzz in the room—Colonel Fermín Quesada had arrived in the casino fifteen minutes ago. Quesada, the army commander in the city of Holguín, the latest of Batista’s avengers, had become the most hated figure in Cuba to the rebels. Alfie passed the news of his presence to Renata and Quinn on the chance they would consider it a threat. Quinn and Alfie agreed they had done a bit of gun handling, but who knew that? Quinn looked at Renata in her new whites. Did she look like a quarry of the army or police? With that wig she didn’t even look like she looked yesterday. Renata said she was fine; they all felt remote from official scrutiny.

“I don’t have sides in this revolution,” Alfie said, “but that puke of a man, I could empty a pistol into his face right here. Last Christmas Eve everybody in Cuba is with the family, right?
Noche Buena.
And he arrests twenty-five men, one with seven kids, Twenty-sixth of July people mostly. A union leader, one from Prío’s party, young guys, couple of commies. The soldiers are friendly, just come with us for a few questions, and they take them out of the houses and on the road they break their ribs, strangle them, hang them, shoot them, dump them. Two sons of my cousin Arsenio, an old outlaw who helped Fidel from the beginning, the army wouldn’t tell him anything. Then a taxi driver tells him they found two bodies. They’d cut half the face off one of his sons. The other son they machine-gunned his crotch. Somebody heard a lieutenant say, ‘He won’t fuck anymore.’ I’m looking for that lieutenant.”

Noche Buena stopped revolutionary activity in Holguín for weeks, and overnight Quesada was the army’s exemplar of Cuban peace through death. The army promoted him to colonel, Batista gave him a dinner at the Palace, and suddenly he was a candidate to lead the battle against Fidel in the Sierra. Now here he is playing roulette with the commander of Cuban intelligence.

Quinn saw Inez coming along the aisle toward them, in heels and a dark blue dress, her hair in a tight coif, a new image, not glamorous, but smart and sleek, befitting a casino hostess. She smiled at them all and said through her teeth, “Get out of the club now. Right now. Something is happening. Go. Go.”

And so the three stood and walked casually out of the nightclub and Quinn pressed the elevator button in the foyer where two men in suits and neckties, one of them Javier from the garage, were playing slot machines. Javier saw them and turned his back, dropped a coin into the slot, and pulled the handle. As the elevator door opened, the slot machine rang its bell and delivered a rattle of coins which Javier made no move to retrieve. He popped another coin. Then the elevator door closed on the trio.

Did five minutes pass? Ten?

They were in the Buick when Colonel Quesada and Lieutenant Colonel López from the SIM, with his aide Captain Godoy, and their three wives, the men in civilian clothes, the wives in dinner gowns, entered the foyer from the casino. As the captain summoned the elevator, Javier and his comrade took machine pistols from under their suit coats and shot Quesada first, then López, also hitting both women who, in terrorized flight, collided with their own mirror images and slumped. One bullet grazed the necktie of the captain, who snatched the pistol from López’s shoulder holster and fired at the shooters. But by then they were out of sight, on the run toward the casino’s rear exit onto Calle 25.

When they reached the Nacional Alfie called Inez to find out what Javier and his comrade had wrought. It was chaos: López and the women wounded, Colonel Quesada executed with such extreme suddenness that he did not yet know he was dead.

At the hotel bar Alfie toasted Javier with daiquiris and Renata recapitulated the killing—carried out by Javier of the 26th but with guns from the Directorio—a refreshed alliance of the groups that had been working for the same cause, warily independent of each other. If the Directorio had killed Batista, Fidel would now be irrelevant. At the garage Aurelio had said the guns he was buying would go mostly to Fidel, a gift from the Directorio in exile. Renata had asked him then, “What of all the guns Diego and I put in the Sixteenth Street apartment?”

“Still there, but we have nobody to get them.”

Renata remembered how Alfie’s mouth had tightened with functional hatred when he said he would shoot Quesada in the face. Alfie was a crazy one, and he might help us bring out the guns. She would find money somewhere to pay him. She would give the guns to Fidel as another gift. Yes, Alfie would do this and Quinn would help. They would all talk about it. There was a bond among the three of them. Quinn did not seem afraid. They left the hotel and she watched him as he drove, memorizing his face.

“You must find a place to stop, out of the light,” she said.

“Are you all right? Are you ill?”

“No, just stop.”

Quinn parked on a dark street and looked at her staring at him. She leaned toward him.

“Love me, Quinn,” she said.

“I will,” he said, “I do.”

Then, with their first touch of love since they’d met, he embraced and kissed her, and she crawled inside him.

“Love me,” she said.

“I will. I will love you. I love, I love Renata.”

“Love me,
lléname,
fill me.”

“Yes,” he said, “I can do that.”

Struck by the brilliant light of the enabling moon, Quinn spiraled everything he knew about love into the center of this divine woman. At this sudden onset of joy he heard Narciso chanting:

“The dead surround him and claim him as their own.
He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”

Quinn received the music and his pulse skipped a syncopated beat.

At Quinn’s apartment they stopped making love at three in the morning, not because they were finished, they were only beginning; but it came to Quinn that if Renata really did want to go home for her own Changó beads and to see her parents, this was the time. Checking out the home of a museum guide who knew a dead rebel would be low priority on the night the police and the army were out in major numbers tracking the two killers of Fermín Quesada. Renata said Quinn’s suggestion was perfect and they would not even have to park near her house. They could park on the next street and keep hidden by tall bougainvillea the whole length of her garden, and go in through the French doors to the house.

From the bougainvillea they saw no one, only the light in Renata’s kitchen, and just before four o’clock they entered her home like burglars. She took Quinn to the living room and he sat alone with the light from a street lamp glinting on the crystal chandelier, the huge silver punch bowl, and large silver-framed photos he could barely see but presumed were her parents. As he gained power over the darkness he saw a painting that demanded his gaze—a full-length albino figure, faceless except for cutout eyes, embracing a black figure with a hidden face, the albino holding a fish that was grinning like a devil. The figures were overlain with strands of seaweed, and the image haunted Quinn. He remembered a similar painting in the Bellas Artes, obviously by the same artist, illuminating the grisly myth of Sikan, who was beheaded for revealing the secret of the god Tanze; and in days to come Renata would tell him the grislier tale of the painter herself, dead of suicide.

Renata had gone quietly upstairs to her mother’s bed, knelt beside it and whispered “Mami,” then shushed her mother and held her arm so she would not move it and wake her sleeping husband. She backed away, beckoning her mother, and they retreated to Renata’s room where she delivered a capsule history of two days of death, terror, and fear of the police who wanted to interrogate her as the friend of a Palace attacker. I knew him only through his painting, Mamita, it is such a tragedy. I am all right, as you can see and I have Esme’s car and I have a friend downstairs, an
americano
who helped me, and we’re going to Cárdenas to stay with Tía Gabriela, but you must tell no one where I am or they will come and arrest me. I need clothes and money, Mamita, and don’t tell Papa or he will be furious and think I’m in politics. But the politics are not mine; they belong to an artist I knew who is dead.

While her mother went to get money Renata pulled from under her bed the large cardboard box where she kept valuables and letters. She took out the red and white Changó beads and put them around her neck. She uncovered the three pistols she kept in the box, put two back and kept the Colt Cobra .38, which she wrapped in her underwear and put in the suitcase along with blouses, skirts, makeup, hairbrush, toiletries, and the bottle of perfume, Gardenia, that Alejo Carpentier gave her.

Her mother sat on the bed by the suitcase and handed Renata six hundred dollars in cash, all she had in the house. Renata said that’s wonderful, tell Papa I love him and I will call, or maybe someone else will call and say the clock is fixed, which will mean I am all right.

“Natita,” said her mother, “you are a problem child and you do not tell the truth. I won’t ask what this is about for it will kill me if it is what I think it is, and kill your father before it kills me. You have a second life. One life is not enough for you. You are the strangest child and I love you for that, but be careful with your precious life and do not be crazy. Now take me down to meet your American. Is he Catholic? Does he have money?”

Quinn instantly recognized Renata in her mother’s beauty, obviously a genetic gift to this family. Even in her tightly clutched silk robe she had the elegant, lustrous look of a silent movie vamp—Dolores del Rio came to mind.

“My mother, Celia,” Renata said. “Mama, this is Daniel.”

Quinn took Celia’s fingers in his hand and kissed them and said he was incredibly happy to meet the mother of Renata, whom he valued beyond words and whom he wanted to marry as soon as possible.

“Marry?” said Celia.

“The first time he saw me he told Hemingway he would marry me,” Renata said.

“Hemingway? What does he have to do with you?”

“It is a long story, no, a short story, Mamita, but I have grown fond of Daniel very quickly. He is from New York.”

“And that makes everything all right?”

“I knew you would like him.”

“I don’t even know his full name.”

“Quinn,” said Quinn. “Daniel Quinn. And I really believe it’s fated that I’m in Cuba and fated that I met Renata. I’m tracking my grandfather who came here in the last century to write a book about your national hero Céspedes. I read that book in high school and dreamed of coming to a place like Cuba and writing about battles and heroes and villains in a war like your Ten Years War. Now there’s a war in the streets of Havana, and in the mountains of Oriente, and I’m here and I’ve started writing about it.”