Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (4 page)

“That was the lover who is the king?” Quinn said.

“Yes,” she said. Tears came to her eyes and she went into the office.

Quinn had been reading the
Havana Post
for a week, thinking its twelve pages did not leave much room for him, but maybe he’d make room. It was a brisk, pop sheet with Earl Wilson and Winchell, Blondie and Alley Oop, ship arrivals, an Anglo-American social calendar, headline stories from the AP, and whatever local, sports, and social news the rest of the space could handle. When Quinn entered the city room only four people were at work: a barrel-chested old man with white hair and brown skin reading galley proofs at a long table; a fine-featured brunette in her forties, alone on the rim of the copy desk editing wire copy; a tall black man who with two-fingered typing seemed to be translating a story from a Spanish-language newspaper; and Max Osborne, with open-collared shirt and tie, reading that same newspaper at his desk in a glass cubicle. Quinn crossed the room, tapped on Max’s glass and stood in his doorway.

“I asked Renata to urge you to hire me,” Quinn said, “but she said you’d hire me without her. Is that true?”

“Hemingway likes your writing, is
that
true?”

“He’s never seen a word of it. His praise of my novel was fiction.”

“We don’t publish fiction here.”

“I brought you some clips.” Quinn put an envelope on Max’s desk.

“Are you any good?”

“I’m uniquely talented. Read me.”

Max opened the envelope of clips, a few feature pieces Quinn had written for the Albany
Times Union,
and a dozen articles about Cubans for the
Miami Herald
, one on the two pro-Castro factions, one faction without money, one flush and probably CIA; also an interview with Carlos Prío, the president ousted by Batista’s 1952 coup. Prío fled to Miami with millions in public money, but denied to Quinn that he was spending it on guns for rebels to bring down Batista.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“
Suficiente
. I can get along.”

“You talked to Prío.”

“I saw him handing out cash in his hotel suite. People were lined up in the hallway waiting to beg money to feed the family, or get out of debt, or bring a relative off the island, or hire on for the next invasion. His assistant had a stack of cash on a table and if Prío liked what he heard he’d say, ‘Give him an inch,’ and the assistant with his six-inch ruler would measure off a bit of the pile and send the beggar away with a smile.”

“I like your sentences,” Max said after skimming the clips. “I’ll hire you if you write something valuable.”

“About what?”

“That’s your problem.”

“I can do maybe two pieces a week. I’ve got a novel to write.”

“Two pieces will do if they’re good.”

“What about my press credentials?”

“You move fast.”

“Get your story in the first paragraph.”

“You’ll get a press card if I buy your story.”

“I may need a card to get the story.”

“I’ll give you a note.” And Max typed on a
Post
letterhead: “The bearer is a reporter on a three-day news assignment for this newspaper. Please grant him all normal courtesies.” He dated it and typed his name and signed it illegibly.

“Why are you in Havana?”

“It’s closer than Paris,” Quinn said. “I followed my nose, and it led here. I thought Miami would be exotic, but it’s pointless. Havana has a point. In Albany they merely steal elections. Here they put a pistol in the president’s ear while they show him the door.”

“I know Albany. It had very entertaining corruption, and it was wide open, like Havana. I went there on weekends with a classmate.”

“Albany’s corruption is still in bloom and its sin is eternal.”

“That’s comforting. You know Alex Fitzgibbon?”

“Everybody knows the Mayor.”

“We were at New Haven together. He comes here now and then.”

“Wait a minute. Were you at Alex’s house when Bing Crosby was there? Nineteen thirty-six?”

“I was.”

“So was I. I was a kid.”

“Sure. And your father got Bing a piano and he and Cody Mason sang ‘Shine.’”

“Right. My father now works for Alex in the court system.”

“And here
you
are, trying to work for
me
. Yale runs in your family.”

“I don’t work for you yet.”

“But you’re trying. My daughter, Gloria, goes to convent school in Albany.”

“If we talk long enough it’ll turn out we’re first cousins.”

“Coincidence isn’t all that coincidental. How do you know Hemingway?”

“I introduced myself last night. He ever behave like that before?”

“Not quite like that, but yes. That fellow he punched out called this morning and wants us to tell his story. But Hemingway’s not news when he punches somebody. If they arrest him, maybe, but now it’s a dogbite story.”

“Renata didn’t think so.”

“Renata. I saw how she got to you. Everybody goes ga-ga. She’s easy to love, but she’s not easy. She’s tough.”

“I told her I was ready to marry her. She’s thinking it over.”

“You do get your story in the first paragraph.”

“That fellow who sang for us, Papa’s punching bag, where’s he staying?”

“Cooney? He’s at the Regis.”

“Maybe I’ll go apologize to him for Papa.”

“He’s not a story either.”

“I could interview him as a composer.”

“Dog bites composer. It’s still not a story.”

Renata could not find Diego, her fine and dangerous lover, for good reason: he had been
acuartelado
in an apartment house in the Vedado with fifty-two other men for four days, waiting for the signal to attack the Presidential Palace and kill the dictator. Simultaneously fifteen other attackers led by José Antonio Echevarría, the leader of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, would leave from another apartment to take over Radio Reloj and announce to all Cuba that Batista was dead. Days and nights passed, the cool moon yielding to new morning and the return of smothering heat in the apartment, for no windows could be opened. Whispers, no other sounds, were permitted, for the young men’s presence here was secret. Read, don’t talk. Sleep, don’t snore. Only five at a time can smoke, and only by the window in the back room. Nobody goes out except Carlos, the leader of the attack, and Diego, who will drive the streets of Old Havana in Carlos’ car to estimate the presence of soldiers.

The attack had been set for the twelfth until Diego and Carlos, on the morning of the eleventh, found Calle Colón blocked to all traffic. Only the Colón entrance to the south wing of the Palace offered a door to be breached. That south wing faced Bellas Artes across Zayas Park. On the early morning of the thirteenth the street was still blocked, but an inside informant said the dictator had stayed the night in the Palace, and was there now. At eleven o’clock the barriers were gone, traffic was again moving, and Carlos and Diego drove onto Colón. A soldier with a machine gun was monitoring a car as it entered the south wing’s driveway; so yes, access was possible. That soldier could be the first to die.

“We should go to Bellas Artes now,” Diego said to Carlos as they moved. They saw Military Intelligence cars parked nearby. Diego went into the museum and found no troops, no SIM agents. Renata was talking to an Americano. She saw Diego and came to him.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Don’t talk. Today you must work here all day.”

“I’m supposed to finish at two,” she said.

“Work till six. We may need you to drive someone.”

“What are you talking about? What is happening?”

“Don’t go out of the museum. Stay inside and work all day, do you hear me?”

“I hear.”

“Do you have your mother’s car?”

“No.”

“My car is on Agramonte. The key is in the ashtray. If you don’t see me later drive it someplace safe and leave it. Someone will call you about where you put it.”

“Why won’t you drive it? Won’t I see you later?”

“Who can say?”

He kissed her with a fierce mouth and squeezed the life in her body. Then he said good-bye my love, and went back to Carlos in the car.

At two that afternoon the fifty-three Palace attackers who had been
acuartelados
wrapped their Thompsons and Garands into the bedding they had slept on, came down the stairs silently in pairs, and climbed into the Fast Delivery panel truck parked by the side door. Four men, including the leaders, would ride in each of two cars. As the vehicles were being loaded two men turned coward. Carlos said he couldn’t shoot them now because of the noise, but they would be held in the apartment at gunpoint by a comrade wounded in an earlier shooting. Maybe he would shoot them later. They knew this was a suicidal mission. We can kill Batista or they can kill us all.

The attack proceeded: Carlos driving the lead car, with Diego and two others, and the Fast Delivery truck following with forty-two men. The truck was unbearably hot, without light, and so overloaded that its six tires were nearly flat. The second car, driven by Aurelio, second in command, with three others, followed the truck. The plan was that once the three vehicles had breached the entrance, another hundred fighters in trucks and cars would arrive shooting heavy weapons, certain to demoralize Palace guards into flight. If the first wave found Palace access impossible, the attack would move against a secondary target—the Cuartel Maestre, the armory of the police—where they would seize its arms, then move to another police station for more arms. There would be no going back. The vehicles moved at inchworm pace through dense traffic. Menelao Mora, at fifty-three the oldest man in the truck, and an ex-legislator in the Cámara and former ally of Prío, told his young comrades what to expect, how to move and never stop. Machadito, holding the rope that kept the rear door from flapping open, saw his girlfriend crossing Aguila and said, “
Mi amor, allí está,
” and his comrades stared at him.

The truck turned onto Ánimas, the driver’s mistake, and separated from the two cars. Carlos and Aurelio both waited for it to catch up at the Prado, and when the three vehicles were again in tandem they moved onto Colón, and there it was. Carlos very suddenly careened into the Palace driveway, hit the brakes and bolted from the car firing his M-1, running under the arcade of the Palace’s gate, his surprise so perfect that the guards did not slam the gate shut or realize it was time to do that, or even see who was firing the machine gun that was killing them. Diego was behind Carlos, and Aurelio, leaping from the second car, took out the two guards shooting at Carlos’ back. Then others jumped out of the truck—Machadito and Carbó and Menelao setting the pace, the rest in twos and threes shooting, remembering Menelao’s advice—don’t crouch, don’t stop—run to the Palace wall out of the line of high fire from the upper terraces. But those machine guns roared, riddling the truck and pavement with such a hail of bullets that clouds of stone dust rose around the men who instinctively sought cover or stasis in the face of the impenetrable and died throwing a grenade or shooting at the sky. Carlos opened the gate and yelled, “
Arriba, muchachos,
it’s ours!” Diego moved through the gate after him and the Palace was breached according to plan.