Havana

'This is good, but I ain't getting rid of the buzz in my head until I see that fucking guy in a gutter with his fucking face blown off. Oh, I want that fucker,' said Frankie.

'We will get him. You'll see. Havana is really a village, and everybody talks. He's down here, where else could he go? And some whore or pimp will give him up rather than face Beautiful Eyes and his American friend.'

'I hope you're right. I'd hate to bring more bad news to Mr. L.'

They walked back to the car. There wasn't much point in getting into it. They'd spent the evening cruising. They only took one break when Frankie felt a sudden need to drill three Chinese hookers on the third floor of the Pacifico, a few blocks down Zanja from the Shanghai Theater, but that only lasted a few minutes.

'I should call,' said Frankie. 'My boss will want to hear what is going on.'

'Yes, of course.'

And so he did, walking across the street to a pay booth, inserting a nickel, ordering the operator to connect with Meyer's private number, knowing the old man would be up at this hour, totaling the house's take on this night as on all others, and watching as the courier left for the airport with the checks so that he'd get to the Miami bank at opening hour, 10 A.M.

But Meyer wasn't interested in a report.

'What the devil took you so long? I have been waiting for hours for you to call.'

'What is it, Meyer?'

'Ah, some other people are interested in helping us find this fellow. And they've put the word out, and now there's a report.'

'I'm all ears.'

'There's a whore who works a brothel just across from the dirty movie place?'

'The Shanghai. On Zanja. We were just in that neighborhood.'

'Yes. Some months ago, when the congressman was in town, he kicked the hell out of her, and our man pulled him off. He saved her life. But the afternoon he escaped, she disappeared. She hasn't been to work since.'

'You think he's there?'

'Frankie, go slow. Don't go busting in all in a rush, like you did the last time. Take it slow. Make sure he's there. Be thorough, be careful, be precise. You have to do it this time.'

'I won't fail you, Meyer. Not this time.'

'Her place is on Zanja Street. No. 165 Zanja. The apartment is 204.'

Frankie committed it to memory.

'We're on our way.'

'Go end it on Zanja Street,' said Meyer.

Chapter 56

There was no way to sleep. The orange burn of the lamps at the marquee of the Shanghai flooded through the window of the small apartment across Zanja Street; its flickery intensity was unstoppable. You could not escape it. In the room, it penetrated everywhere, not only on sheer power but also by its imperfect wiring, which filled the air with crackle and hum and the on-again, off-again buzz of the ever-pulsing middle letter 'g.'

He curled away from it and hallucinated sleep, but sooner or later that buzz cut the darkness, his eyes popped open, and he saw the fireglow on the wall. Once so disturbed, he could not recover unconsciousness. He'd rise, and turn, and there she'd be.

Esmerelda didn't talk. She didn't sleep. She just looked at him worshipfully, as if adoring a saint. By the second day it had begun to weigh heavily upon him. If she'd spoken his language, he'd have screamed: What do you want? Why are you staring at me? Are you crazy? It's not right to stare at anyone like that.

But she just stared, dumb and adoring. She was hefty, he now saw, and without makeup quite appalling. The beauty and body that Congressman Harry Etheridge had tumbled for and tried to capture didn't really exist; they were the delusions of an old man who thought of sex too often and hunted it everywhere.

Her skin was pockmarked. Her teeth were false. Sometime back in a terrible past, someone had cut her badly and the lace-work of scars embraced her throat, ran down her chest to the dark hollow between her immense breasts. Not that they were beautiful breasts-not like the plush, streamlined ones on the long-gammed, flouncy-skirt babes pilots painted on their bombers during the war. No, unsupported, they flattened like sacks of flower, slapping this way and that under her blouse. Her hair was black and greasy. She had a mole next to her left nostril. Her nose had a blunt, hard-busted quality. Her fingers were stubs, her arms were sheathed in flesh, and her behind was a hemisphere all its own.

On the first night, she'd been all tarted up, open for business. On that occasion, her cheeks were artificially red, her lips swollen also with red. Makeup caked her face, pinkish on the cheeks, crusted black above her eyes. Earl thought: Only a bosun's mate at sea a year could harden up for this poor old woman.

She had to be forty, well used, much saddled, much infected and reinfected, much rotted. She was in her knowledge of what men want and do beyond surprise, but for one: her love of Earl.

He had in some inadvertent way pried open the gates that held back her emotions, that had been hammered shut by twenty-five years of pimps cutting and beating her, johns screwing her or demanding yet more recondite pleasures, mamasitas treating her like meat, her pay for all that agony and debasement a few dreary pesos, a dollar now and then, and then back in daylight to her little chamber across from the Shanghai, to be alone with her fears and doubts.

Now she had only Saint Earl to worship. Jesus didn't do the trick any more, though he still hung in agony two or three times in each tiny room of the tiny apartment.

Sweetie, he thought, you sure as hell could have done better than this old man.

But not by her lights. She gazed at him adoringly. She touched him sexually the first night, as if to say, whatever, whatever you want.

He shook his head no, and it only made her love him more. He took his wallet out and showed her a picture of Junie, the one taken at the USO party at Southeast Missouri State Teachers College, when he'd been on bond tour in January of 1945, where he'd fallen in love with Junie, and one day after the picture was taken they'd gotten married, and one week after the marriage he'd left to rejoin the battalion for the invasion of Iwo Jima.

'My wife,' he'd said loudly, 'my wife,' not knowing the Spanish for it, but hoping that she'd see in Junie's delicate beauty, the upturn of her nose, the flaxen quality of her hair, the perfection of her lips, the warmth in her gray eyes why he loved his wife so, even if, truly, he thought she now had disengaged from him and all his damned adventuring.

But Esmerelda didn't understand. Oh, she understood the wife part, but she didn't see how that equaled chastity. She seemed to believe that yes, he loved his wife, wasn't that wonderful, now let's cuddle and fuck.

'No,' he said, seeing the hurt it administered, wishing he didn't have to hurt her. 'No.' And he wondered, how do I explain? I have to stay true to this woman. It's all I have left in this world.

Esmerelda had touched him on the inside of the thigh.

'No,' he said, 'my wife. My wife.'

That was three days ago. Now it was only waiting. Esmerelda didn't leave in the night. She was his sentinel. In daylight, she went out with some money he gave her and came back with food: egg sandwiches, rice and beans, a pint of milk, some banana-like chips fried as if they were potatoes, and on that he subsisted.

He was scared.

Earl was scared.

Not like this. Really, no, there had to be a better way. He looked around for a weapon and only a paring knife was capable of taking human life, or possibly an old chair could be broken up and yield a club. But of course what he wanted was a gun. Without a gun, up against heavily armed men, he knew he was lost.

He thought about sneaking out in the night, conking a cop and taking one of those 9mm Stars they had, that looked just like.45s. Or maybe he'd be even luckier and come across the one in three officers who toted a tommy gun.

He obsessed on it. Just a good roundhouse to the side of the head, not too hard, and the guy would be down