Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (5 page)

On the third floor of Bellas Artes, Renata was explaining to seventy American and English tourists that the young woman in the painting was named Sikan and she had met the sacred fish, Tanze, quite by accident. But for both it was a fateful meeting, for young Sikan would be kidnapped and dismembered as a sacrifice in order to recover the lost voice of the gods which was the voice of the fish. Why it was also fateful for the fish Renata did not have time to explain for the bullets came in through the front windows and then the screaming and warning yells—they’re shooting! Renata now realized Diego would die.

She yelled to the tourists, Get down, somebody’s shooting. Who’s shooting? What does it matter who’s shooting if they shoot you, get down you fool get down, and the fool got down. Renata knew Diego was now shooting at somebody and somebody was shooting at him. He was saying, We will kill the devil, we will butcher the butcher, as he entered the Palace with his M-1. That young man of such culture and knowledge and courage and beauty would be a sacrifice today. Renata listened as he whispered to her: Be careful, they will know I love you and will remember I kissed you, I shouldn’t have, but now they will question you about me and you must tell them we only talked about painting and Santeria and of course they will believe you, for you look so innocent. He was shooting now and he will kill before he is killed. The
guardia
at the Palace will also deliver sacrifices today. She could see Diego shooting on the Palace stairs, so agile, so alert to the living instant, and she crawled to the museum’s stairs to see everybody below, all crouching or flattened by the guns, which stopped, began, stopped, began. Why are they firing at Bellas Artes? We have no guns.

Diego saw Aurelio hit and lifted backward into the air and saw his pistol and grenades fly out from his belt. He saw Hernández, a year away from being a doctor, run toward the gate and die in a sprawl. Castellanos came yelling,
“Lo logramos,”
we got it, and shot a guard who had left his machine gun and was running back into the Palace.

The Fast Delivery was full of holes and Gómez sat behind it, waving his arms, already dead, the cement dust billowing around him. Diego saw Aurelio shake himself and stand up, without a weapon. The ground floor was empty of guards but bullets kept raining down across the open patio. Diego moved upstairs onto the left wing of the Palace’s second floor with four others—Carlos, Almeida, Goicoechea, and Castellanos.

Five others had made their way up and along the second floor’s right wing and from there Machadito lit the fuse of a seven-stick dynamite bomb and threw it to the soldiers on the third floor—who thought it was artillery, and their firing stopped, momentarily.

The five on the left moved along corridors and when the phone rang in an empty room Diego answered it. The caller asked was it true as José Antonio announced on Radio Reloj that Batista was dead? And Diego answered, “Yes it is true, we have seized the Palace and killed Batista.
Viva el Directorio!
” Then he followed Carlos across a corridor toward Batista’s office. But the map from Prío showed an opening where now there was a locked door.

Carlos shot the door, which opened into a dining room—dirty dishes on a table and three servants crouching in a corner. Goicoechea wanted to martyr them, but Carlos said no. He asked where was Batista? They said he’d just had lunch but they didn’t know where he went.

“
A singar,
” Diego said, fuck!—and he ran toward the Hall of Mirrors and to the glass door into Batista’s antechamber. Diego heard voices beyond the door and called to them to surrender and a gunshot shattered the glass door in reply. Carlos tossed a grenade through the broken glass but it did not explode; he threw another, then a third, duds all. Diego dropped in a grenade that blew off the door and they entered the Batista sanctum shooting at two corpses.

The butcher has fled.

They looked on Prío’s map for the secret passage to the third floor but found nothing. From the Hall of Mirrors balustrade they looked down at a dozen patrol cars on the Avenida de las Misiones where police, shielded by trees, fired up at them. They found their way across to the right wing to meet the five who were now four: Menelao shot, unable to get up, Machadito, Carbó and Prieto all firing upward, and Brinas dead in front of them.

Carlos tested the stairs going up but fell back from the shooting and said we need our backup men, I’ll get them, and before Carbó could stop him he went toward the down stairway where Brinas had been shot and ran under the fusillade that was the last thing to touch his life.

Diego was hit but running. “I’ll cover your retreat,” said Machadito, and his machine gun silenced the troops above while Carbó and Prieto and Goicoechea made their way down, and then the last five were out of the Palace, all bleeding and running from the guns on the Palace roof.

Carbó was running with Diego toward Bellas Artes, but the gunners on the roof hit both—Carbó’s arm, yet he kept running, and Diego, his shirt covered with the blood of others, who went facedown into the water of the Zayas fountain. The others kept on toward Montserrate, shooting at anything coming after them, anything ahead of them that impeded their way to someplace else.

Quinn sat in a fifth-floor mini-suite at the Hotel Regis, studying the shape of Cooney’s head bandage, which looked like a turban wrapped by a one-handed Arab, absurd enough to match the cause of the injury, large enough to match the reputation of the man who caused it. Cooney wasn’t clear on Quinn’s purpose in coming here, nor was Quinn. Cooney doubtless paired Quinn with Hemingway as the enemy, but Quinn had apologized in his call from the house phone, asking for a meeting to explain what he was not sure he could explain. He would not claim illness or pathological aggression for Hemingway; but the subject needed examination. It still might turn into an article for Max, but Quinn didn’t need that either. He was out to affix reality onto experience for himself, maybe also for Cooney, and rescue the event from drift into fistic barroom legend that would otherwise end with a whimper as the stretcher exits the Floridita and another right cross and a left hook from Hemingway become a footnote in the archive. There was more to it than that.

One of Cooney’s pals from Jersey sat beside him with narrow eyes and a pushed-out lip, keeping watch on this visitor who might be bringing new trouble. Quinn remembered the man from the bar. He didn’t speak and Cooney didn’t introduce him.

“How’s your head?” Quinn asked.

“They say the skull’s not cracked, just cut and swelled up,” Cooney said. “But that son of a pup ain’t heard the last of Joe Cooney, I kid you not.”

“Are you a vengeful man, Mr. Cooney?”

“Revenge? I’m sure as hell gonna get me some.”

“You’ve got a right. But I should warn you—he’s got money and power down here. And he’s very famous, and well-loved.”

“They love him? Don’t he punch out any Cubans?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s no stranger to fights. But he’s king of the Floridita. That’s his domain.”

“King of a barroom.”

“And of everybody who walks into it.”

“How’d he get to be such a big shot?”

“He wrote some great books.”

“That don’t seem enough.”

“He also fights in all the wars.”

“I fought in the Pacific. Got a Silver Star.”

“If he knew that he wouldn’t have hit you.”

“Why’d he hit me?”

“He had a problem with your song. He also likes power and thinks you get it with your fists or your gun. He’s a serious hunter.”

“So am I.”

“You and he have a lot in common.”

“He send you here to see what I’m gonna do?”

“No. I only met him for the first time myself last night.”

“Hit me a sucker punch, for what?”

“I agree it was barbaric.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“It means savage, uncivilized. The primitive arrogance of force. Crude exercise of the ego. Everybody’s an enemy who isn’t himself. Nothing personal, now, but he sees you as a cipher, a zero, a cliché, a mark. Fair game for lofty thinkers.”

“Shit,” said Cooney’s friend, and he stood up from his chair.

Quinn heard the fireworks outside, then explosions. Cooney’s friend opened the louvered screen doors and went onto the balcony overlooking the street and Zayas Park.

“They’re shootin’ down there,” the friend said. “Cops or soldiers looks like.”

Quinn and Cooney stood up to look out. Uniformed men were shooting at people near the Palace. The street was chaotic, people running, crouching behind cars, in doorways, traffic stopped, police firing at civilians who were shooting machine guns. Machine-gun fire strafed a bus and shattered its windshield, and the bus driver climbed the sidewalk. A soldier in the turret of a
tanqueta,
an armored truck, looked up at the front of the Regis, then turned his machine gun and raised it. Quinn said, “Look out!” and instinctively backed inside and hit the floor as the soldier fired. Cooney’s friend fell backward across the threshold with bullets in his chest. Cooney, splattered with blood, stood staring at his friend but Quinn grabbed his wrist and said, “Down, Cooney, down,” and pulled him to the floor. Quinn crawled toward the door as more bullets came through the louvered doors and hit the wall, and plaster showered onto Quinn and Cooney.

“What is this Cuba for chrissake?” Cooney said. “They hit you for nothin’ and they shoot you for standin’ outside, even inside, and you didn’t do a goddamn thing to them, this is fucking rotten hell if I ever saw it.”

“Good reason to keep your head down,” Quinn said. “Maybe they think you’re a sniper. They don’t know you’re a tourist. Crawl to the hallway, head down. What’s your friend’s name who was shot?”

“Chet Looby.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Baltimore, same as me. Why you askin’ me questions?”

“I keep track of stuff,” Quinn said.

He crawled past a room where loud music was playing, a Cuban song he recognized, one of the few he could name, a
son
, “Lágrimas Negras.” He equated it with old death in Cuba as announced on the
Miami Herald
’s newswire, or rebels dead in the street trying to get rid of Machado, or the distant slaughter in the Mambí revolution his grandfather had written about—slaves and rebels on horseback, hacking out a mythic path with their machetes, a prelude to today’s diorama of corpses baking on sidewalks in the park, a newly blooming garden of rebel death. In his historical memory these warriors fell without bleeding but now the gore was personal for Quinn, its splatter visible on his trousers, and he could hear its music. On the streets below, the attack wave of the new sacrificial generation was becoming aware that bleeding to death was its destiny and that suicide-in-arms is a noble choice of exit from a righteous war. And Black Tears from on high fell onto these very necessary corpses.

The hundred young rebels in the second wave, now sitting in cars, trucks or houses, waiting, could hear no music. Some heard on Radio Reloj that the attack had begun, some could hear the calamity of the Palace machine guns, but their leader, struck with indecision, could give no signal to attack those guns. And so the first wave was massacred and the president preserved.