The world went about its business and I went with it.
The ‘important things’ I had taken care of were simple enough. Don Ceriano would give me a name, sometimes show me a photograph, and I would be despatched. I would not return until the man that bore the name was dead, no matter how long it took. Between the death of Pietro Silvino and my departure from Cuba I had taken care of eleven ‘important things’. Each of them was unique, each of them special, the last one of which was my father.
Killing your own father is a truly spiritual experience: such a thing cannot exclude killing a little of yourself, yet at the same time it is an exorcism. There are some I have spoken with who talk of carrying the faces of the dead, as if some small part of their spirit enters you as they die, and from that point forward they will always be there. If I close my eyes and think hard enough I can remember all their faces. Perhaps, just perhaps, I can look in the mirror long enough and see their reflections in my own eyes. Imagination plays a part I am sure, but I believe there is some truth in what I have been told. We carry them all, but I – at least – carry the image of my father the most.
When he died he was all of forty-six years old. I had arranged a job for him at one of the smaller nightclubs in Old Havana, a club owned by Don Ceriano’s brother-in-law, a wild-eyed and aggressive gambler called Enzio Scribani. Scribani had married Don Ceriano’s youngest sister three or four years before, and though his promiscuity and perverse sexual tastes were legend, there was something about the way in which such things were handled that denied the possibility that he would be anything but family. Later, six or seven years after I had left Havana, Don Ceriano’s sister, Lucia, a beautiful innocent-looking girl, killed her own husband by driving a pair of pinking shears through his right eye. She had then taken her own life.
My father, his reputation as the Havana Hurricane still to some degree intact, was employed as a doorman at the Starboard Club, a relatively minor concern in the grand scheme of things. Here the walk-on players and bit- piece actors in the grander theater of Havana’s Mafia operations came to flirt with the hostesses, to gamble hundreds instead of thousands of dollars, to sometimes wander through the rear curtains where worn-out Cuban housewives would dance and take their clothes off for ten or fifteen dollars a time. It was a shabby place in reality, and though Enzio Scribani was the owner and proprietor of the establishment he seemed to make it his business to be there as infrequently as possible.
My father did his job. He turfed out the drunken Cubans; he protected the dancers from their irate brothers and lovers and husbands; he escorted the money couriers from the club to the bank; he made little noise, he did not complain, he took his dollars at the end of each week and he drank them away before Monday rolled around again. With the money I earned from my Havana work with Don Ceriano I had rented a five-room apartment off Bernaza near the Old Wall Ruins. Here, my father had a room where he would sleep off his drunk until it was time to wake and return to work. I saw little of him, and with this arrangement I was satisfied. He spoke little, and when he did there was always an underlying apologetic tone, and as the months drew on I became less and less interested in what he had to say, and more intent that at some point soon he would cease to be my responsibility. I did not hate him. Hate was too strong an emotion for someone towards whom I felt nothing. Less than nothing. I often imagined that, in attempting to eject an undesirable from the Starboard, he would embroil himself in a fight that would get him shot or stabbed or beaten to death. But there was no such event. It seemed that my father, in relinquishing his arrogance and conceit, had also relinquished his right to be involved in anything of moment at all.
In the latter part of August 1961, a few days after another engagement had been organized for myself and an adversary of Don Ceriano’s, after another small matter had been perfunctorily despatched, I received a visit at my apartment from Giorgio Vaccorini. To me he was known as Max or Maxie, after Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom the boxer. The nickname had been earned as a result of an incident outside the Hotel Nacional when a parking attendant had tried to take Giorgio’s keys from him in order to park and valet the car. Giorgio, drunk and incoherent, had believed he was being robbed, and he turned and let fly with a roundhouse that broke the kid’s neck. One punch and the teenager was dead. The matter was closed within half an hour with the delivery of ten thousand US dollars to the home of the Cuban National Chief of Police. So Maxie came to see me late afternoon. He looked serious, a little tense, and he asked me to sit down as he had some news for me.
‘A little problem,’ he started, and again he assumed a serious expression. When these guys got serious then life was serious.
‘Your father,’ he went on. ‘There seems to be some kind of problem with your father.’
I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs. I looked around for my cigarettes but could not see them.
‘He went with the delivery guy to the bank this morning,’ Maxie said, his voice hushed, a little hesitant. ‘They took the usual kind of money, maybe five or six grand, and they went off to the bank just like regular.’
I sat patiently, waiting for the problem to be voiced.
‘Seems they never reached the bank, Ernesto. Seems that your father and the courier never arrived at all, and we got to thinking that perhaps they did a runner with the money.’
I nodded understandingly.
‘An hour or so ago we found the courier. You know Anselmo, young guy with the scar on his face here-’ Maxie raised his right hand and indicated a point above his left eyebrow.
I knew Anselmo Gamba; had fucked his sister one time.
‘We found Anselmo with his throat cut down an alleyway off of one of the sidestreets near the Starboard, maybe two or three blocks away. There was no sign of your father. Not the money neither. So Don Ceriano… Don Ceriano said I should come down here and speak with you and see if you couldn’t take a look for your father and take care of things, you know?’
I nodded.
‘So that’s what I came to tell you,’ Maxie said, rising awkwardly from the chair. ‘See if you can’t find him, sort out what happened, okay?’
I smiled. ‘Okay Maxie, I’ll sort things out. Tell Don Ceriano that whatever the problem is isn’t a problem any more.’
Maxie smiled back. He seemed relieved to be going. I showed him to the door, placed my hand on his shoulder as he stepped into the hallway, and noticed that he flinched. I noted this inside. Even Slapsie Maxie, a man who had hit a kid with a roundhouse and busted his neck, was a little scared of the Cuban. This pleased me, confirmed once again that I had become someone.
I waited until Maxie was out of sight and then collected my coat and my cigarettes. I left the apartment and started towards Old Havana and the watering holes where I knew my father would be hiding.
It took me three hours to find him, and by then it was evening. The sky was black, almost starless.
Even as he saw me coming towards him across the floor of a beat-to-shit rundown joint on the coast side of the quarter he started to cry. I felt nothing. This was business pure and simple, and I had no time for over- emotional performances.
‘The money?’ I asked him as I slid in beside him on the seat.
‘They robbed it,’ he slurred. ‘Robbed the money and killed the kid… I tried, Ernesto, I tried to stop them, but there were three of them and they were quick-’
I raised my hand.
‘Ernesto… they came out of nowhere, three of them, and there was nothing I could do…’
‘You were supposed to protect the courier,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘That’s your job, Father. They send you along to protect the courier, to make sure that the money gets to the bank, that nothing happens to him on the way.’
My father raised his hands as if in prayer. ‘I know, I know, I know,’ he whined. ‘I know why they send me, and every time I have done my job, every time I have protected him and nothing has happened-’
‘You have the money with you?’
My father opened his eyes in shock. ‘The money? You think I took the money? You think I would kill someone for money? I am your father, Ernesto, you know I would never do something like that.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I know you, Father. I know you would kill someone for no money at all.’
He did not reply. There was nothing he could have said. All these past years the death of my mother, his wife, had sat between us like a third person. It had always been there, spoken of or not, it had
My father shook his head. ‘You have to tell them… you have to tell them what happened. You have to make
