Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (31 page)

Jake Hess cocked his head and said, “Bobby Kennedy?”

If Jake knew that Quinn was talking about Tremont thinking about shooting Alex Fitzgibbon and not Bobby, who was already shot, he’d pick up the phone and call Alex; for Jake, though now counsel for the newspaper, had for forty years been part of the legal brain trust of the Democratic political machine that ran this town—Patsy McCall and Roscoe Conway and Elisha Fitzgibbon, and now Elisha’s son, Alex Fitzgibbon. And Jake knew where all the bodies were buried. Yet Quinn never trusted anybody in politics more than he trusted Jake Hess, a principled man who would be the first person Quinn called if he went to jail, which was why he was now talking to Jake, who would know which way to move through this conundrum. Jake’s parents were Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms, a cultured man with ashen hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, gold watch chain looped across his vest, never without his suitcoat, soft-spoken, a 24-karat smile, and a conscience that, against the odds, had survived the political wars.

“You’re saying Tex is the one who shot Bobby?” Jake asked.

“No, Tex was here in town, too drunk even to shoot himself. Bobby’s just my for-instance,” Quinn said.

“Some for-instance.”

“Roxy had somebody else in mind, but I can’t get specific yet.”

“What’s your question?”

“Can they arrest Tex just for being ready to shoot somebody like Bobby Kennedy?”

“He would have to commit an overt act before anybody could prosecute him,” Jake said.

“What about being part of a conspiracy?”

“You need the overt act.”

“Is giving Tex an AR-15 and taking him for target practice and giving him money to do a shooting—is that an overt act?”

“Any witnesses?”

“I don’t know, but Tex says he’s still got the AR-15.”

“An overt act isn’t necessarily a criminal act.”

“What about trying to talk somebody into a crime?”

“Criminal solicitation. But you need something that puts it into play.”

“What if somebody like me finds out about a conspiracy or a criminal solicitation? If I don’t tell anybody is that a crime?”

Jake’s phone rang and he mostly listened to whoever it was, not looking at Quinn. When he hung up he said, “That was your publisher.”

“Penn?”

“Penn. He mentioned your assassin and said the Mayor is his target.”

“He talks too much,” Quinn said. “See why I can’t use names? He probably already called the Mayor.”

“He hasn’t but he wonders if he should.”

“Did he call the FBI?”

“He wants to.”

“You didn’t tell him to go ahead, did you?”

“I said I’d call him back.”

“What about when I go out that door, will you call the Mayor and give him my news?”

“I think he’d rather hear it from you.”

“I tell the Mayor somebody’s planning to shoot him, that’s your legal advice?”

“He’s had threats before. I’m sure he’d appreciate the tip.”

“How do I protect Tex?”

“He’s safe. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“What if I don’t tell the Mayor and somebody actually shoots him?”

“You might have a problem, but not a legal one.”

“Guilt?”

“Guilt is an elective. Reprisal, perhaps?”

“If I’m arrested will you represent me?”

“Only if you feel guilty.”

“You think this will make a good book?”

“Your friend Tex, you mean?”

“Everything that’s happening, the whole megillah. Who’d believe what’s going on right this minute? Tex, Roxy, Claudia, Roy Mason, Matt Daugherty, Bobby, riots, vigils, my wino friends, and maybe you and me thrown in for the hell of it. There’s a lot of mystery and they’re all telling me to pay attention to them.”

“Sounds like a panoramic newsreel.”

“That’s not worth writing. If I can’t find a focus the hell with everybody. People like the title—The Slum Book—but they don’t like the subject. Another protest book? The woods are full of them. I see heroes but editors see winos and bums. Who wants to read about bums, especially bums in Albany?”

“They don’t know our bums.”

“I also want to put Cuba in it.”

“Quite a place, Cuba. I went to Havana in ’27 when Mayor Goddard was thrown out of an open car. Do they have any bums in Cuba nowadays?”

“No bums allowed. They’re all communists.”

“Society isn’t complete without bums.”

“Tell that to Fidel. You know my grandfather wrote about Cuba. You ever read his books?”

“I remember he was quite an achieved figure. What was his name?”

“Daniel Quinn.”

“Unforgettable name.”

“He wrote about Grant at Vicksburg, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, what a story that is, and he did a book on the Cubans’ Ten Years War against the Spaniards and their slave empire. He went down there in 1870 to find the Mambí rebel leader nobody could get to, and he got to him. He rode with the Mambí troops in a battle with the Spanish, he wrote later on Irish genocide that started in Cromwell’s era, and he turned up stories of Irishmen in Albany who’d been sold as slaves in the West Indies. He also rode with the American Fenians when they invaded Canada after the Civil War to take Ireland back from England, and he tracked the famine Irish, which he came from.”

“He consorted with death and darkness,” Jake said.

“Exactly, and it fed his argument on the children of desolation, dead millions destroyed by true believers who waged the holy and then the unholy wars. He concluded that the great losers never lose, and revolutions never fail; they evolve heroically, with the memory of martyred multitudes and the survivors’ imagination perpetually breeding a counterforce, and new heroes to drive it.

“He wrote of a runaway slave in Cuba, Nicodemo, wounded in the war with the Spanish, left arm useless, doing a furious dance of sexual abandon to the beat of a Mambí drum and galvanizing the black men and women watching his every twitch. He equated Nicodemo with an illiterate slave of sixteen, Sooky, who yearned to be a poet and sang her poems at the Albany Pinksterfest, a wonderchild to all who heard her. The Pinksterfest, held when the azaleas bloomed, was a week-long Mardi Gras where the slaves of Albany vented their misfortune through music, dance, and carousing.

“Nicodemo died in battle a week after his dance, beheaded by the Spanish. Sooky carried live coals in her shoes to burn her slavemaster’s barn to ashes and was hanged as an incendiary on Pinkster Hill, where she’d sung her poetry. Albany cancelled the Pinksterfest forever, believing so many blacks drinking and dancing held the potential for revolution.”

“Your grandfather wasn’t old enough to see a Pinksterfest, was he?”

“No, but he knew the old Adam Blake, who was always master of the revels. Body servant of the Patroon, an unlikely revolutionary. But my grandfather imagined such people having ecstatic dreams that rose up from a dimension of the spirit where revolution against the invincible is perpetual—no matter how many billions are massacred or destroyed. Nicodemo and Sooky were such warriors. We insist, therefore we continue. Call me dead, call me phoenix.”

“Your grandfather sounds like Candide,” Jake said.

“But Candide wound up tending his garden. My grandfather never quit throwing himself into losing causes and war all his life, not as a warrior but as a witness who needs to know how it turns out. It became his political necessity. I heard his weird music in high school when I read his books and scrapbooks, and it eventually sent me down to Cuba, which was lush with death, spurious gods, and pernicious doctrine, but also with that century-old Mambí warrior spirit that had never died. It drew me into compacts with gunrunners and I went up in the hills to see Fidel. I even married a gunrunner in a ceremony presided over by ancient African spirits.”

“I’m deeply sorry I missed that. Is this what animates your book on the slums?”

“Ethereal slumgullion, a mythically nutritious new literary form. Are you aware my first novel comes out in September?”

“The story of the political kidnapping?”

“That’s the one. It’s about my uncle, the pool hustler.”

“Am I in it?”

“Under another name.”

“Any true believers in it?”

“Under another name.”

“Will I recognize them?”

“I call them politicians.”

Renata put Gloria to bed and monitored her until she was asleep. Then she called Max at the number he’d left and told him to get a cab and come up here. Twenty minutes later he walked in with suitcase and briefcase in hand, wearing a white guayabera and tan shoes, a bit of leftover Cuba in his style, the first Renata had seen him in a year. He put down the bags and kissed her on the mouth, tried to linger, but she backed away and sat in an armchair. She pulled her skirt over her knees and he smiled. He thinks I’m on guard. She did not want to be alone with him, but it was necessary.

“Those bags,” she said. “You don’t have a hotel room?”

“I’m not staying. In transit, you might say?”

“Where are you coming from, and where are you going?”

“Miami, and I’m not sure what’s next.”

“You flew in?”

“I did. A charter.”

“How flamboyant. Do you want to stay here?”

“A tempting offer but I don’t think it’s in the cards.”

“You’re mysterious, Max. What is going on?”

“Everybody’s dying and I’m sick of it. First Inez Salazar, and then an actor I knew, both in Miami on the same day, now Bobby Kennedy shot, and an hour ago I hear Cody Mason’s on the way out with cancer—all this in two days.”

“I know about Cody. I told Gloria we’d go to his concert tonight. That great talent disappearing. How did you hear about him?”

“I was at the Havana Club and he came in. He’s thinner, but he looks pretty good. His son says he’s out of time.”

“You talked to Roy?”

“He tends bar. Smart and radical, like you.”

“Why are you talking about these deaths?”

“They seem connected.”

“Is death following you? Is that why you left Miami?”

“Problems came up. I saw Alfie in Miami the day before yesterday. He always speaks well of you. He’s done ridiculously well since Havana.”

“Is he as wild as he used to be?”

“People don’t change.”

“Was he with Inez when she died?”

“He took care of her, paid her rent and medical bills, but after she developed cirrhosis he wouldn’t go near her. He took it as an omen. Is liver disease an omen?”

“We create our own omens.”

“I saw her in the hospital, bloated and almost comatose. Her eyes followed me and I’m sure she was cursing me for being alive.”

“Poor Inez. Life was so unfair to her. She probably saved my life in Cuba the night they shot Quesada, and then what she did for me at the embassy.”

“I remember the embassy,” Max said. He picked up a small statue from an end table: bearded man on crutches, his bandaged head bleeding, a cloth around his loins, two dogs at his heels. “Lazarus in Albany. Babalu Aye, a bit of Havana.”

“I’ve tried to keep Cuba in this house. That, for instance,” and she pointed to a painting of an arresting figure, Sikan, a woman in black and white net body wrap holding a fish that embodies the god Tanze, a discovery that threatens Sikan’s life. “It was the one painting I took when we left Havana,” Renata said.

“You miss the old life. The country clubs, partying till dawn, all that shooting.”

“I did love it. Not the shooting.”

“I think you loved the shooting.”

“I loved what was sensuous and unpredictable in how we lived.”

“You don’t have that?”

“Sometimes. I went to North Carolina for two weeks with a group from the university to register black voters. And I went to Selma for the march, the second one, after the blacks were gassed and run down by men on horses and beaten.”

“You’re still fighting the revolution.”

“Of a different kind.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No. No battle scars.”

“What about your social life? No nightclubs.”

“None like Havana. I never go. I’m too old for children’s games.”

“You were no child when we played our game.”

“Shhhh,” she said, shaking her head and pointing to the ceiling.

“Would you go back to Havana?”

“It is not possible.”

“It’s possible if you want to do it,” he said, and when he smiled she saw a gauntness that was new: his cheeks, his neck slimmer than ever, his guayabera loose on his frame. The thin man. Was he sick? He seemed younger than his true years, hadn’t lost his hair, something of that old magnetism still there.

“I didn’t expect you to come to Albany,” she said. “I thought you’d wire the money through a bank.”

“Was your bank really going to foreclose?”

“They threatened, which is why I called you.”

“Don’t you have money coming in?”

“Daniel tells everyone his annual salary is below the federal poverty level, and I could make more begging on the street. The museum doesn’t pay serious money to my kind. They use wealthy women who take no salary, the same as in Havana. But we’ll be fine if we get through the summer.”

“And after that?”

“Daniel’s book will be published. That will bring a check.”

“How big a check?”