A Quiet Vendetta

smoke Cohibas and Montecristos and Bolivars and Partagases.

‘Up there,’ he told me, ‘near where they live, you will find the little birds.’

‘The little birds?’

Ruben smiled. ‘Yes, Ernesto, the little birds… the faggots, the queers, the homos, the young men who will take it up the ass for a dollar and a pack o’ smokes.’

I closed my eyes. I thought of that night as I waited for the tide to turn, as I buried my fingernails into the palms of my hands and paid the ferryman his price of passage. I knew what Ruben Cienfuegos was talking about, and with that knowledge came a sense of hatred and loathing for whosoever would support such a terrible trade.

‘The rich guys go down there, the ones with all the dollars, some of them Italians, some of them Cuban businessmen who have a taste for such things.’ Ruben smiled and winked and lit another cigarette. ‘And I have an idea, my little Ernesto,’ he said, even though I was older than him by a year or two, and then he smiled and winked again and told me of his plan.

Three nights later, dressed in a clean white shirt Ruben had borrowed from his cousin on his mother’s side, Araujo Limonta, with pressed pants made of thick cotton, with canvas shoes similar to those worn by the boatmen who haunted the bars along Avenida Carlos M. Cespedes, I stood with my heart in my mouth and an American cigarette in my hand near the corner of Jesus Pergerino Street. I stood there patiently as the cars drove by, some of them slowing down as they cruised along the curb, and I waited for as long as I believed it possible to wait. Later Ruben told me it was no more than ten minutes before a car pulled to a stop ahead of me, as the window came down, as a greasy-haired man with a gold tooth like Carryl Chevron the salesman leaned out towards me and asked me how much.

‘Two dollars,’ I told him, for this is what Ruben Cienfuegos had directed me to say, and the man with the gold tooth and the greasy hair had smiled and nodded and reached his hand through the window and waved me over. I climbed into the car just as Ruben had said, my heart thundering enough to burst right there in my chest, my teeth gritted, sweat breaking free of my hairline and itching my skin. I sat silently as the man drove a half block further and slowed to a dead stop in a dark pool between the streetlights. Ruben said he would be waiting. Ruben said he knew where the men would take me, and as he told me these things he told me that I was to act naturally, to act as if I had done such things a thousand times before, for he would be there – my savior, my benefactor – and he would ensure no harm came to me.

The greasy-haired man placed his left hand on my knee.

I flinched, I could not help it.

The hand with its fat fingers, with its single gold ring with a blue stone set within, traced a line from my knee towards my crotch. I could feel the pressure against my leg, could feel the weight of sin that was intended, and I closed my eyes as that same hand reached between my legs and started rubbing me, just as Sabina had done, but this time different, this time with a motion that made me sick inside.

What Ruben hit the man with I do not know. But he hit him hard. I didn’t even see him coming, but through the open window on the other side of the car a dark shape came rocketing in towards us, and collided with the back of the man’s head.

His anticipatory leer became a wide-mouthed expression of shock – but just for a second, nothing more than a heartbeat – for he swayed backwards suddenly, and then his head rolled sideways on his shoulders and he fell against the dash.

I came out of the passenger door as if I had been ejected with great force. I fell to the road, fell to my hands and knees, and though I wanted to puke I could manage nothing more than a dry choking cough. My instinct told me to drag the greasy-haired gold-toothed man out of the car and kick him, to kick him hard and fast, to kick him in the head until he would never wake up, but Ruben was then beside me, lifting me from the road, standing there to support me, to start me laughing as he pointed at the unconscious form of the man in his tailored suit, in his expensive car, the sickening pervert smile wiped from his face with one swift blow to the head.

‘Quick!’ Ruben said, and together we entered the car.

We took the man’s ring, his pocketbook, his watch, even his shoes. We took his leather belt, his keys, his cigarettes and a half bottle of whiskey we found beneath the driver’s seat. We ran from the side of the car laughing like schoolgirls, and we kept on running – down San Miguel and across Gonzalez, across Padre Valera and Campanario – and we kept on running until I felt my lungs would implode with the pressure.

Later that night, as we smoked the man’s American cigarettes, as we drank his whiskey, as we counted once more the sixty-seven American dollars we had found tucked into the back of his pocketbook, I realized that everything I could ever wish for could be taken with violence.

Back so many years before – in deciding to kill a man for the knowledge he had brought, deciding to do something that would make my mother proud of me, but in some way had made me a reflection of my father – I had taken my first step down a lonely road. There were those, people such as Ruben, who would walk with me for some time, but even Ruben Cienfuegos, with his wide smile and riotous laughter, with his whiskey-fueled bravado that night in La Habana Vieja, was not among those willing to take the necessary extra step. I could have killed the man, could have dragged him from his car and beaten him just as my father had beaten so many men before. But my father had only ever killed a man out of passion, out of the fury born of his sport, whereas I had killed a man for something I believed I could own. I believed then that such things were in my blood, and it would only be another two weeks before the blood rose once more, before I realized that what I was doing was not simply a matter of ability, but more a matter of necessity. I could kill, and so I did, and the more such killing I carried out the more necessary it became. It was like a virus that gripped me, but it came from the mind and the heart and the soul, not from the cells or the nerves or the brain. It was there within me, perhaps had always been, and it was merely an issue of eventual provocation, the force majeure, and Cuba – its lights, its heat, its promise, its emotion – seemed to fuel that provocation without effort.

I became a man in Havana. I became my own hurricane. Seemed to me that every life I extinguished was in some way a repayment to God for how He had mistreated me. I was not so naive as to consider myself piteous or worthy of special vindication, but I was not so ignorant as to believe that what I possessed was anything but valuable. There were men who would pay for what I could do. Rare is the soul who will take another’s life, and then walk home, his hands steady, his heart quiet in his chest, taking only sufficient time to consider how well he had executed the act, how professional he had been. It became the semblance of a vocation, a calling, and I followed the calling with a degree of natural response that served to excite me.

Ernesto Cabrera Perez was a killer by nature and by choosing.

I made my choice. I wore it well. It suited me, and I suited it.

I consummated my craft in the first week of February of 1960.

The intervening year was one of real life. During those months, as Cuba stretched through her growing pains, as Havana reestablished itself beneath the new regime, Ruben Cienfuegos and I lived life like there was no tomorrow. We stole and cheated and conned our way through many hundreds of American dollars, much of it finding its way between the legs of hookers, down the necks of bottles, and out at the bloody mid-afternoon cockfights and nightly jai-alai contests. We believed we were men; we believed that this was how real men behaved, and we felt little responsibility for our actions and significantly less scruples.

Castro was the Premier of Cuba, el Comandante en Jefe, and with his own breed of communistic vision he had ousted the Batista-owned and run casinos. He was not blind to the ravages of hedonism that had raddled his homeland, and even on the eve of his assumption of power the peoples of that same homeland had stormed the multi-million-dollar hotels that had once served the tourist trade and lined the pockets of Batista’s family and the organized crime cohorts. In downtown Havana the crowds were frenzied and enraged. They stormed in their hundreds to the doors of the casinos and hotels, and broke their way into the empty air- conditioned, plush-carpeted foyers to wreak havoc. Inside they found roulette, dice and card tables, bars and slot machines, ten thousand of which had been controlled by Batista’s brother-in-law. Batista’s Mafia-financed palaces were destroyed. The military and the police stayed in their barracks, senior officers knowing all too well that their own troops would merely join the mobs, and no-one stepped forward to prevent the people from tearing the hotels and gambling joints apart.

Castro abolished gambling as one of his first decrees as the new dictator. Even as the decree was passed,