Men in Miami Hotels (25 page)

He straightens up. “Let’s go.”

Stubbs lifts his hand, but it’s only to get a grip on Cot’s shirt. He holds him from behind, pressed in close. “You getting too old for hoodlum work, fella.” Cot can smell the man’s breath, a mix of alcohol and wintergreen. Fort Wayne is a farm town, right? He hooks the cop’s leg with his, kicks forward, and smashes him to the pavement. He whirls as Stubbs falls and catches the pistol—his own Beretta—before the cop can fire it and tears it from his hand. The cop cries out, or tries to, but Cot stomps him in the face, stomps him again, and feels the cop’s teeth break and his skull give under his heel. He takes the man’s little pistol from his jacket pocket and works it under his waistband in front. The cop moans, and Cot stomps him again. “Country boy,” he whispers.

He eases left, runs along the front of the restaurant, and slants across the street past shuttered bookstalls and into the park under dense, fragrant shade. The air is cool, lighter as if he’s crossed a border into another, less solid country. There are amber pole lights at intervals along paved pathways, but off the center lines among gushed patches of areca palms and big roble trees just coming into bloom the park is dark. Cot angles left, away from the spot where Spane and the others have entered. He stops under a large trimmed schefflera bush and waits. He can’t hear anyone. He thinks he sees movement up ahead, a pale patch disappearing around the side of a small square concrete monument. A breeze edges without a sound through the top of a large tamarind tree. A voice—off to the side, not nearby—says “You got him?” It’s Nolan’s voice. “Fuck, shut—” Squinky’s voice—and a gust of damp breeze cancels the rest. Cot’s waiting for the one he senses, just up ahead behind a bank of bushes, to let himself be known. Long nights in bushes he remembers, hunters outside some ugly house in the Grove or by a sidewalk in a rundown district, once lost among viney pines on an estate up in Delray Beach, waiting for a betrayer to show himself at his bedroom window in a house dark as a tomb. An emptiness, the loneliness of unoccupied space . . . and there he is.

Cot runs low along a large shambled hedge, steps around behind the slim shapes of a couple of tall cypresses and shoots Bobby Noticia—crouching, looking the other way—straight in the face. Bobby, a short, fleshy man with hairy forearms he likes to keep exposed, staggers back with a look of bland and untroubled surprise and collapses into a small gray-leafed bush. Cot is on him quick; he snatches his pistol from his hand, flings it away. A shot whips by his face, and Cot cries out and leaps in a lunging fall behind a small flowering hibiscus. The sound of the shot’s not muffled by a silencer. Cot thinks it came from Squinky’s 9mm Glock. They couldn’t have brought guns into Havana could they? Maybe they came by boat. Spane too is a Cuban citizen, a spy if the truth were known, a shambling, avuncular presence at Miami anti-Castro rallies, son of a cofounder of the old
Movimiento de 26 de Julio
standing with his hands clasped before him under the painted loggias of the brotherhood as they buried another of the old-timers. Maybe he receives dispensations thereby.

A rustle in bushes across from a small grassy patch—Cot lies with his pistol tucked under him, the barrel pointing toward the bushes. His eyes in the amber radiance cast by a small pole light look closed, his body still, not breathing, but he’s watching Squinky and Nolan advance, each from a different part of the bushes. Just as Squinky steps free of foliage Cot lifts slightly and fires, catching him with a single bullet in the forehead. Squinky’s eyes jam up into his head, and his mouth twists as if he’s saying bitter words, and he pitches face-first onto the grass. Nolan’s flat expressionless face meanwhile doesn’t even wince, but his hand is slow. He gets off a wild shot that kicks up soil in front of his own feet, and Cot shoots him in the body twice, low and then high in the chest. Nolan staggers, takes a couple of mincing steps, falls to his knees, and slumps back on his ass leaning forward; he’s dead, sitting there.

Cot’s already on his feet running, dodging between trees. He notices a large gray cloud high up, moving stately as a frigate. The moon hasn’t come out yet. A single star, frayed and delicate, hangs near the front edge of the cloud. Thoughts of a mangled reclamation whip by in a flash as he cuts between bushes, veering across trails, past a small tree in full pale bloom that seems suddenly catastrophic, leaps a patch of pavement, and enters an area where clumped low succulents are arrayed around a little fountain water trickles out of. Over from the way he’s come, catty-corner, he sees movement. He fires instinctively. Someone, some American, cries out. Cot runs at an angle toward the voice, keeping bushes between him and the place the cry came from. He stops under a small shrub that smells of iodine. He can see a man crumpled on the ground. It’s Archie Erlanger, old friend he used to go bowling with when they were younger, bowling, like in-line skating, like dynamiting fish, a fad that passed through the troop without leaving any mark. “Archie boy,” he whispers, “sorry.”

“Cot, I didn’t mean. . . .”

Cot shoots him again, and he’s silent.

He turns to go, to slip between two bushes shaped like Christmas trees, but a shot he doesn’t hear just grazes his temple. A burning streak of pain, amplifying in deepening shades of red as it goes, sprays in his brain, and he hits the ground, out, gone.

H
e comes to with Spane squatting over him. Spane’s smell—of ginger and cigar smoke—envelopes him like a cloak. Spane has his knife out, and he’s cutting Cot’s left shoe off his foot, his half-boot. Cot can hear the leather parting and it feels like his own skin cut into, and this makes him want to shriek but he doesn’t. He can see the meager and breeze-shivered top of the big ceiba tree that every Cuban schoolchild is told is the tree under which the country was founded; he knows this tree. Cuba another memorial gift to the West from Indians no longer on the scene. Spane is speaking to him, but Cot can’t understand what he’s saying. “You murdering freak,” Cot says.

“That who that was?”

He can hear him now.

Spane is saying something, speaking earnestly, his head bowed over his cutting that has almost reached flesh. “
Mutilado
,” Cot whispers and the knife stops and Spane lets his breath whistle out between his teeth. “You would know,” he says. His wide face, leaning over him, sags away from the bones as he speaks, giving him larger jowls, making his sharp dark eyes smaller. Spane is trying to explain something to him. Cot sees that, some figment or false aspiration, some moral certitude or reckoning come on like a philosophical principle, like the notion of spirit
contra natura
, or love eternal, even for killers, that you can lean over and sample from the freshly crumpled body of your enemy, some joke and crazy way of looking at things that they all have going for them, dumb villains, careening around the neighborhoods, crouching over the fallen, whispering clichés to the dying. It’s the energy that makes killers do that, you can’t keep it quiet—

“It doesn’t matter,” he says.

Spane sticks the tip of the blade in Cot’s cheek. Cot flinches away, he can’t help it. The stab hot like a bee sting, jabbing into Ordell’s fork marks. Spane sits back on his heels. There’s the sound of voices on the other side of the park. Automobile lights in a street that’s been closed to traffic for years. Shouts. It isn’t hard to tell what’s coming.

“I think they want to speak to you,” Cot says.

“No trouble from those
cuntalingos
,” Spane says. He looks scared, and feverish, and dislocated in some essential part. “How you feeling?”

“——————”

“Yeah, well, okay, I’m so sad about it.” Spane taps himself in the temple with the blunt side of the knife blade. “I’m sad about your girlfriend actually.
Our
girlfriend. I’m not sad about her husband, that DA asshole. I did you a favor on that one.
He
won’t be missed.”

“Not now,” Cot says. Even in this faded light he can tell Spane is shook. Maybe looking over the edge into the other world, the one just like this one except you aren’t in it yet. “I’m coming,” the dying say as if they know. His head hurts. But he doesn’t say anything. Spane is still talking, expelling words in a rushed, whispery but clear voice and preachy manner, an eagerness that’s not really believable. The knife flashes in the amber light, but it doesn’t touch him again. Spane’s smile—Cot can see it—looks slightly puzzled.

“My foot,” Cot says faking agony and reaching.

“Yeah. I’m sad about that too,” Spane says looking at the work boot cut almost fully away in an open gap over his pale sock, “I know I was after something—I am, man, after something—those gems—” but Cot is after something too, and he finds Bert’s little gun snug against his belly, snatches it out, and before Spane can react, presses it against the man’s temple and fires. Spane’s eyeballs go instantly black, his mouth rubbery. He falls over in the grass.

Cot kicks at his fat body and springs up and runs fast away from the sound of the voices speaking their charged and eloquent Spanish, the cut boot slipping on his foot as he runs, slowing him a little, but not enough for anybody to catch him.

H
e crosses town into an older, darker part where the streets are wet from a rain he hasn’t noticed and parts of buildings project out over the street like displaced ornamentation, follies and extrusions darker than the buildings themselves. The sky is a bland and murky strip rivering above his head. A man comes up to him, a small person in a shirt that is vaguely yellow in his mind, and tells him he will show him the way to go. He leads Cot by the hand into an even darker street where from open windows women moan in a language never heard before in the world. Cot has to stop and fix his boot, and the man waits for him softly panting. When he stands up the man takes his hand again and leads him to a large stone building on the corner of a street that is still running quietly with nightlife. At the curb men stand before barrows that smell of burning charcoal and fried meat. Cot can see the fires like red bedding in the barrows. The men wear hats with the brims turned down. In the building is an upstairs Peruvian restaurant, and the man leads Cot to the door and stops. He won’t go in. Cot understands that he wants his tip. Cot gives him five dollars in American money and climbs the stairs to the second floor, enters and takes a seat by the window. Down in the street men speak to one another in depressed and wheedling voices. A small Peruvian woman wearing a dark red apron comes up to him and asks briskly what he wants to eat. Cot orders the
aji de gallina
and drinks an Inca Kola as he waits. He doesn’t want to think about anything, and this is surprisingly easy. He asks the waitress for some tape, and the woman brings a roll of black duct tape to him. He uses this to close up his boot. The air in the restaurant seems foggy and charged as if it’s hooked to a mild electrical current. The woman brings the chicken stew, and Cot eats it rapidly. He has never been so hungry. He thinks: I will stay here in Cuba, maybe buy a little house down in Playa Mayabeque where Daddy used to take us on the bus to go swimming. But the thought of it, the thought of his mother running on the beach in her white shorts and shirt makes a pain start up. Maybe the mountains, he thinks, over in the Sierra Maestra, up where the air is cool. The restaurant is nearly empty. Only an old man smoking a pipe at a table in the corner, a Chinese couple eating slowly from a huge pile of
jalea
fat pink shrimps poke out of. Cot drinks a cup of coffee and scratches from his pocket the Cuban pesos he took off the dresser at his father’s place. On a radio on the counter they are talking about him, and talking about the body the firemen discovered under his father’s bed. The mention of her stabs through him, and he can feel the strings and mucks of his insides tearing and he wants this to go on, obliterative and sullen, the stupid aliveness that he will now sink back into, and he starts—or maybe does only slightly—to rear up like a horse startled, some fresh snake moving across his feet, rises and steps back. He’s glad his father didn’t have to be the one who found her, a favor in the
desastre
. As he lays down bills he smiles at the man behind the cash register, takes a toothpick from the little clear plastic turnstile on the counter and digs between his teeth for remnants.

O
utside the restaurant the night is darker than before. Maybe there’s been a power failure. The red coals in the barrows gleam like the familiar vestiture of a ritual common and immutable. He starts down the street and soon loses his way. Huge, pale, finned automobiles like the strung-together catch of some mordant, vanquished magnifico, are parked end to end along the curbs. They’re dusty as deserted furniture he runs his hand over. Shop windows are ghostly and contain behind their streaked picture glass items hulking and shrouded. The buildings rise into a gloom of starless night. As through a big
júcaro
tree a breeze checks and comes on, sidles left, and drops to the ground, something—a figure, tangle of life—seems to rush from his body and dissolve in the dark. He stands looking after it as if he is looking at something pulpy and real, but there’s nothing. A moment later a light goes on behind shutters off a balcony. A woman’s voice, small and harassed, begins to sing, a song in English that is almost but not quite familiar to him. He stands in the street listening and shivering. The singer goes abruptly silent, and the light is switched off. He smells jasmine just as the feel of some being—shady and imprecise—flows past him.
I know you
, he says, but nothing answers, nothing stops.

Through blank streets he walks steadily. The windows of the tall stone houses are shuttered. He turns up one street then another, making his way in the general direction of his father’s house. But he knows his father won’t be home. He enters a bar, orders a beer, and sits drinking it at the long mahogany
contador
that curves away into haze. Men with huge, baggy lips enthuse in long disquisitions concerning stinginess and failure. Streaks of faint light run like patterning along the upper part of the walls without showing any radiance. A man bumps against him and apologizes profusely and insincerely. A pummeling, weighty sadness overtakes him and almost drags him off the stool. Maybe I shouldn’t resist
anything
, he says to himself, but he tries to keep his place and does. The man wanders off, waving at him over his back like an actor in a movie. A woman in a filmy dress edges into the scene and makes short and pithy remarks concerning his manhood, but he ignores her. She hits him hard in the side. He gets up and feeling the night pressing about him, feeling as if the air itself is sooty with darkness, he speaks to the woman, calling her Louisa, as if this is her name. At the sound of the name she instantly becomes meek and sidles away, abashed, as if he has gotten it right.