Men in Miami Hotels (24 page)

The man throws a look skyward, stands as if transfixed, as if pondering the depths of space, opens the door and splashes down. “Lost?” He has a scruff of white beard and his eyes are mistrustful “Where you going?”

“To the Ambos down there”—indicating with his head:
we all know it.

The man chuckles in a superior, nonthreatening way. “I’m staying at the old International. A queer spot I’ll tell you that.”

“What once was, eh?”

“You said it, buddy. I tell you. I came here as a little boy with my parents, and it made Las Vegas look like a methodist church camp. Where we going?” His voice is strong, undrunk.

“The hotel.”

Obispo is blocked off for tourists, so the cab turns away from the waterfront onto Soledad Marcos. Down the block the pink hotel gleams like a salmon cake. The man looks sleepy. Cot puts his hand on his shoulder. “Still a ways to go,” he says. He has the driver turn down Mercaderes and stop. “What is it, brother?” the man says. An oddness about him, about his manner that under other circumstances would make Cot wary.

“I need you to carry a message for me.”

“Spy business?”

“Somewhat.”

“I wouldn’t think there’d be any secrets in this place any government would need to know.”

“There’re enough secrets between this cab and that hotel door . . .” He lets it go. He’s been a loosener of secret material, pry bar. “Go to the desk and leave a message for Mr. Miguel Spano. Ask them to call him.”

“Miguel Spano. Okay.”

The man starts out the door.

“Wait,” Cot said. “The message.”

“Yeah. What is it?”

Cot knows this is a bad idea—this courier. “Just say Plaza de Armas.”

The man repeats the park’s name slowly, working the syllables with his tongue. Cot offers him a twenty-dollar bill, but the man looks insulted. “Okay,” Cot says.

“Plaza de Armas, Miguel Spano,” the man says, his eyes narrowing as he speaks, as if the words are the unpalatable answer to a question he’s already grown tired of asking himself

“Thanks mucho,” Cot says.

A couple of gold-spangled jackets pass, murmuring. “Drunken ladies,” a voice says. Gulls, up late, cry, wheeling below bottom-lit clouds. Essences, Cot thinks: we get distilled. The man, thick and square, gets out of the cab, heads for the door, his shoulders thrown back. Cot watches him enter the hotel. Ernest Hemingway stayed in room 511, a room that looks west along Mercaderes Street, over the old red-tiled roofs toward the cathedral and the waterfront; you can peep in through a roped-off door. The hotel claims Hemingway wrote
For Whom the Bell Tolls
in that room. Even hotel managers are living in a dream, Cot thinks. He’s sweating in the humid air. An early morning rain is on its way. With two fingers he presses hard at the center of his forehead. Something, a complexity, her face, expressing her arrival in another zone, the dusk light falling on his hands through the bathroom window, some half-bit encyclical is trying to come through.
Spirit is the continual motion toward freedom from nature.
Who said that? Virgil, pulling a fast one? Maybe Jackie. Or his mother as she walked with him under the
canafistula
trees to Fausto’s for groceries. We’re all on our way, at all times traveling, she would say sometimes. Marcella picked it up. I’m on my way, she said.

The man, who he noticed looks vaguely Hemingwayesque, exits the brass hotel doors and walks toward the cab. “I got him,” he says as he comes up. He opens the door and slides in. “Yeah,” he says his head tilting to the side so Cot can see a sharp, burning scar on his neck. “I called him up and gave him the info on the phone.”

“That was good. Here’s the twenty—”

He withdraws his hand as he says the words, remembering the man’s pique at being offered money. The man grimaces. “I told you . . .”

“Yeah, okay. I’m sorry. But thank you.”

Cot waits for him to get out of the cab, but he doesn’t. His belly protrudes above his white slacks like a shiftless tendency. “Thank you,” Cot says again.

“De nada,” the man says. “You sure you don’t . . . ?” he lets the question hang in the cool damp air.

“I’m sure. Sorry.” He doesn’t know what the man’s talking about. Some mystery of his own.

Cot waits another moment. He might have to make the man get out, but he doesn’t want to do that. The man turns his head, squinting back the way he’s come. The sidewalk is empty. “I like that place,” he says.

“Listen,” Cot says. “I need to be on my own here.”

“Actually you look as if you need company.”

“I’m serious.”

The driver turns in his seat, a shock of heavy black hair falling over his forehead as he does so. “
¿Problemas aquí?
”

“It’s okay,” Cot says. When this is over he will carry Marcella’s body from his father’s house, dig a grave in the park across the street, and bury it, and then he’ll return to the house where he’ll crawl into his father’s bed and curl up close to him. This thought swings slowly like a torn paper lantern above a darkened doorway. “What’s your name?” he says to his accompanist who has not moved to exit the cab.

“Stubbs. James L. Stubbs, from Fort Wayne.”

“Mr. Stubbs. I need this cab to myself now.”

“What you need is somebody to set you straight. I know some things.”

“You a thinker? Fort Wayne mastermind?”

The driver watches them through his rearview mirror that has a St. Christopher medal and what looks like a tiny head carved into an avocado seed attached to a string hanging from it. Cot grabs a clawful of the man’s stomach flesh.

“Awf.” The man swings an elbow, catching Cot in the temple. Cot lurches to the side, his head, just at the back corner of his skull, hitting the door frame. For a moment he doesn’t know where he is, or who. Then he’s back. The man is grinning at him, a narrow, non-Hemingwayesque grin. One front tooth laps slightly over the other. “Easy on the bad manners,” he says.

Cot reaches for his pistol behind his back, but the man hits him again before he can get his hand on it, knocking him hard against the door.

Cot feels as if he was shaking his head, but he in fact isn’t moving. He seems—no, the cab, seems to be moving. But it too is standing in the same place, just down the block from the entrance of the Ambos Mundos, out of the door of which Spane, following a couple of the Miami boys has just stepped.

Cot pushes forward in the seat and tries to open his door.

“Hey,” his companion says, “I was just saying—”

“Sorry . . . ,” he’s having trouble working the door.

“You owe me fifteen dollars,” the driver says in English. “That door doesn’t open from the inside.”

“I was just saying,” the big man says, “I’m Jimmy Stubbs, Detective Sergeant, Fort Wayne, Indiana, police force.”

“You propositioned me,” Cot says sounding foolish to himself. His mouth feels cottony and only half his.

Another couple of Miami guys, Squinky Dukes and Nolan Sanderson, come out of the hotel after Spane, who is standing next to a large planter filled with a trimmed ficus bush. How did he get all these guys into Cuba? “I got to go.”

He reaches for his money clip, but the detective catches his wrist.

“I could call the cops,” Cot says.

“Who they gon believe—me or you?”

“I’m a Cuban citizen.”

“You’re a Miami lowlife is what you are.”

“Miami?”

“I could see it a mile away.”

“Wizard.”

Cot stares into the man’s large, sea-blue eyes. Does he know him? Or is he only some mustered bad angel from his dreams? Maybe a local finger man. “
Lo siento, verijas
,” Cot says.

Stubbs pops him again. “Cunt, ay? Now take that wad out of your pocket—take it slowly—and pay this good man.”

“Listen. I have to go. It’s essential. I have to meet somebody.”

“One of your lowlife friends, I reckon. You squirts are still trying to get back in here, aren’t you?”

“We’re a new crowd.” He’s the one tired and drunk, not this man.

“Nothing you do’s new, bucko.”

Cot has out the silver clip Marcella gave him, and it lies like a thin small fish in his lap. He needs to retrieve the bills. He hasn’t changed any money. He works a twenty free, the paper sliding greasily under his thumb, and hands it to the driver. “Keep it,” he says.

“You’re five short,” the driver says in a sour voice.

“
Pescador mosca
,” Cot says, his eyes narrowing. “Okay.” He hands the man another five.

“Now you let us out,” the detective says to the driver in Spanish. “I’ll walk with you down to that plaza,” he says to Cot.

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Oh? I need backup?”

“I’m meeting my girlfriend.”

“Miguel Spano?”

“That’s not her name.”

Stubbs motions to the driver, unnecessarily, since the cabbie is already out and opening the door. As Cot moves to the door Stubbs grabs him by the belt in back, finds the pistol, and shoves him out. He makes him stand on the sidewalk while he frisks him, the familiar indignity. He finds the other pistol in his sock that is strapped down with a green rubber band. “Mr. Smarty,” the detective says in an affected, childish voice.

“You’ll be surprised how little you get out of this,” Cot says. The plates of his skull hurt where the man hit him.

Spane and his men have already disappeared up Obispo, headed toward the park. He shivers. The cop strikes him between the shoulder blades with the butt of his own pistol. “You’re wearing out your welcome,” Cot says staggering. He looks back at the cop who is jamming the pistol under his flimsy, color-spattered jacket. In the window of the cab he catches his own face: face of an alien, a stranger—and not just that, sees the heap uprisen, as if a small section of sidewalk, or the earth underneath it, had wrinkled up. “Just a drift of atoms, bud,” he says to the cop.

“You’re about to slow down to dead,” the cop says.

Cot straightens up. For a second he forgot she was gone. He is blinded suddenly by the knowledge of everything about her he had never touched. His mouth tastes bitter. A passing woman pats her hair with careful fingers as if there’s a secret hidden there and nods forlornly at the man she’s with. The night is cool and has a sour sea smell. A boat whistle gives two short blasts from the canal, outlet to the sea and the Gulf Stream. Cot thinks he’s going to vomit, but he doesn’t. Time is loose and wallowing, fading slowly in and out.
There are no other people like you
, she said, as if this was a great thing.
You’re wrong about that
, he said, hopefully.

He begins to walk toward Obispo Street. The cop follows, speaking as he comes, telling Cot in a low, dispassionate voice how he’s a nobody, a nothing, a puss blister popped in the womb, only a stinking puddle people have to walk around so as not to get the slop on their shoes, a useless, puerile, rotten—

“I already been over that,” Cot says. “Get to the good part.” He flicks one of the trade glances at the cop, the one that says:
I got you memorized
.

The cop catches the look and tries to fling it back but can’t quite. This one’s on me, Cot thinks, checking off the fear rat-slipping in the man’s eyes, feeling a loose ID with him, both of them out way too far. “Slow down,” Stubbs growls, but Cot keeps moving, not fast but steadily.

The other side of the street is lit up past the old
palacio
all the way to the park. The lights seem to beat on the mottled, scaled, high blank sides.
It’s beautiful, just beautiful
. The speckled walls like a fossil lizard skin weathering into a monument—everything taking one step back, he thinks, bust-ups becoming embraces, all that, and the rest slipping sideways into extravaganzas nobody plans.
As you were, friends, now and forever
. In CJ’s tomb he could smell what it was to be dead.

The cop trudges beside him, breathing hard. “This’s going to be bad, huh?”

Cot ignores him.

Ahead the tables and chairs of a couple of fair weather restaurants are piled against the front of the buildings across the street from the park. Long loops of wire hold the furniture in place. Tall royal palms stick up from among the big
varia
trees bordering the park. The men ahead, far enough ahead to be at a distance that separates wondering from surety, come back into view—only for a moment—as they lope across the wide street and go in under the trees. Cot knows them all. Considine. Mizel. Erlanger. One—is it Nolan, dumb as spit?—has looked back just now, but he appears not to have recognized them among the drifting tourists in the resiny lights by the wall of a palace, and Cot knows this couldn’t be.

With the cop following he crosses the street, passing before the verandah of the
palacio
, where Batista and Grau and Machado and the other
capricios
dwindling into a murmurous past sipped champagne with gangsters, his forebears, where the Maximum Leader in his days of triumph ripped phones out of the walls, set fire to the beds, and careened hooting among the gilded furniture. A dog barks from some place far ahead, on the other side of the park, beyond trouble, a small inquiry, apologetic and erasable. A ship’s horn. His grandpa, whom he never knew, maybe his ship. Motion, any motion, is a slip to freedom.
Is that it?

He stops at the corner, waits, takes a step, presses back among stacked and shackled café furniture. Here’s the hard part, one of the hard parts. He intended to be the one already in the park. Now he’ll be the one the others got a look at. Step by step through the slop to this place. The cop comes up behind him. “Yeah, yeah,” he’s saying into his phone, “the corner of Obispo—no, right at the park.” He speaks in Spanish, a brusque and colloquial, Mexican-sounding Spanish. Life shakes you until you’re rattled and look for reasons. But there’s only the motion. Is that it?
Fretful you
, she said.
No more than’s necessary
, he answered.

Stubbs snaps the phone shut and snugs up close. Cot can smell his sweat mixed with . . . the smell of apples, is it? He turns away, a variance, like a house among palms, rising inside him, takes a step back, and vomits against the wall. A thin effluvium, brown against the pale wall, trickles to the sidewalk.
You eat me from the inside
, she said.
Lentamente
, he said. The cop puts his hand on Cot’s back. The hand feels as wide as a plate, as heavy as a plate filled with rocks; it seems to press him down so he has to square his legs to stay on his feet. Nausea lashes him, but he holds on, to balance, to what he thinks of now as purpose (and calculation and faith and resolution and possibility squeezed like a rock squeezed into diamond), to the unbuckling march, that is, to the next moment.
Naturalia non sunt turpia
, Virgil said, or something close to it: Nothing dirty in nature.
But spirit moves anyway to a better neighborhood.