Scarface (19 page)

Elvira gave a short laugh. “About a million miles,” she retorted dryly.

“Now ain’t that a coincidence,” he said, swinging the door wide. “So am I.”

Even as she ducked inside she knew it was not about love, not for her anyway. The moment she laid eyes on him she knew he would fall in love with her. It might have seemed appropriate to wait a little bit, having just walked out on Harry not fifteen minutes before. But she knew instinctively that Frank Lopez, whatever else he turned out to be, would never be middle-middle. And though she didn’t expect to love him, it didn’t mean she didn’t want him. For there was an immediate chemistry between Elvira and Frank Lopez, and not just of the carnal sort. She smelled the cocaine on him ten feet away. He might not be a prince, but he sure as hell had a princely stash.

He was there in L.A. trying to set up a distribution scheme, since Hollywood was the next stop for much of the coke that funneled through Miami. The scheme didn’t take; the action in coke was still fundamentally local, outsiders not welcome. So the only thing Frank had to show for the trip was Elvira Saint James. She really meant it when she said she was free to go. She did not have to stop anywhere and pack a suitcase. She didn’t have to make a phone call or arrange to sublet her apartment. She left L.A. without a backward glance.

They’d been together two and a half years now. He loved her as much as she’d thought he would—no more, no less. He was crazy busy setting up his empire, and he only really needed her when the rest of it got to be too much. Which wasn’t very often, and usually involved a week’s vacation—baking in a boat off Eleuthera, pouring money down the drain in Vegas, buying up half Manhattan. Day to day, mostly they stayed out of each other’s way. They went out on the town at night, but only from eight to eleven. Elvira had safe men—colleagues of Frank’s, the occasional gay tennis pro—who squired her around if she felt like dancing late.

But they did enjoy what they gave to each other, and they savored it more and more, the longer they were together. To Frank she was like a goddess. She spent her beauty recklessly, and she left a trail of gold when she walked. She worked on that; she made it happen. Hours she spent perfecting her beauty—her hair, her skin, her clothes, two hundred pairs of shoes—and because he loved the movement of her, she walked beside him in a trance of sensuality.

What he gave her was the money, the chance to indulge without limit. Without even the limit of decency.

They were thus the perfect couple the night that Tony walked into their lives.

Chapter Five

M
IAMI INTERNATIONAL WAS having a bad day. A torrential rain the night before had caused considerable runway flooding. The winds were gusting heavily in the west, and there was a wind shear alert off and on all morning. The planes inched along through two-hour lines. A DC-10 bound for Houston had just been commandeered by a Cuban national with a bottle bomb. He wanted to go back. The air conditioning had broken down in the International Arrivals Building, and when they finally got it back in service after three and a half hours, they managed to short the computers at customs. It took triple the time to check a passport.

Pan Am 91 from Bogota was two hours and sixteen minutes late landing. The lines at customs snaked a hundred yards down the halls. Tony Montana, in a three-piece silk-and-linen blend, with a diamond on his little finger, kept glancing down at his watch, almost as if he was timing something. He carried a brown glove-leather attaché case, chock full of invoices that proved what line of work he was in. He was the epitome of the young ethnic American businessman, heavily into import-export. On the way up, of course.

At last he stepped up to the counter, where a chunky, sullen customs officer gave him a frigid look. “Mind opening that, sir?” he said. The “sir” was in quotes.

Calmly Tony zipped open the attaché. As the officer probed among the papers, Tony glanced at the next line over. A fat woman pushing a baby carriage had just stepped up to the counter. A squalling child with a toy panda sat in the carriage. The officer waved them through without even demanding to look in the woman’s purse. Behind her was a nun in a full white habit, holding all her papers neatly in one hand. She too was waved on through. By this point Tony’s official was ransacking the attaché, trying to find a false bottom. Of course there was none.

At last the official looked up, seemingly annoyed not to have turned up any contraband. He handed Tony a slip of paper on which his rights were printed, and then he said: “Would you please step into that room over there, sir?” Tony sighed wearily. An old man on crutches was waved through the line right behind him. An armed customs agent came forward and escorted Tony into the interrogation room.

He was asked to strip for a body search. As he removed the fifteen-hundred-dollar suit, they asked him questions about his four days in Colombia. He answered flatly, as if the whole thing bored him. He stood there in his underpants while the sub-agents went through his pockets and felt along the seams. They tapped at the heels of his shoes, looking for a hollow spot. The interrogating agent couldn’t crack his alibi. The import-export papers were all in order. Reluctantly they handed him back his suit, and Tony asked cheerfully: “You sure you don’t want to stick your fingers up my ass?” Nobody laughed.

Tony left the interrogation room with a wonderful spring in his step, as if he’d just gotten a clean bill of health from his doctor. He didn’t seem bothered at all by the long wait. Neither did Manolo, who sat reading the papers in Omar’s Cadillac, the radio and the air conditioning turned up high. When Tony got in, they drove back to Calle Ocho, now and then laughing out loud at how easy it all was.

They parked in front of a nondescript little bungalow, the yard overgrown with crimson poinsettias. This place had been Omar’s stash house for almost two years, which practically qualified it for a brass plaque above the door. A stash house was usually good for about two months. Omar admitted them, puffed with pride, as if he’d just negotiated a dangerous run from Bogota himself. His woman was cooking a big celebratory supper in the kitchen, and the smell of spicy Cuban food permeated the house.

In the living room, waiting patiently for Tony’s arrival, were the fat woman with the baby carriage, the nun, and the old man on crutches. Tony and Manolo sat on the sofa, and the mules handed over the goods. Manolo used his pocket knife to rip open the panda, while the little kid shrieked in protest. A candy bar was produced to mollify him. Half a kilo was tucked in the panda’s belly. Tony, meanwhile, was methodically dismantling the baby carriage. The aluminum handles were hollow and filled with coke in long plastic tubes. Omar knelt in front of the old man and carefully sawed through the cast on his leg. A kilo was banked and padded along the inner face of the plaster. The nun slipped out of her habit like a stripper. Two kilos were strapped to her body.

The fat woman took the diapers off the baby, revealing a thick packet of the drug that had come through unscathed, in spite of the wet. The ex-nun had now moved to her suitcases, where she unpacked half a dozen crude religious statues. Tony gathered up the painted ceramic virgins, carried them into the bathroom, and smashed them in the tub. Then he lifted the bags of cocaine out of the rubble. By the time they were done, they had eight kilos stacked on the coffee table in the living room. The mules were each paid five hundred in cash and told to report again the following Monday, when they would be issued their tickets back to Colombia, this time to smuggle out dollars.

Tony sat sprawled on the sofa, staring happily at his loot. He had engineered the whole operation in Bogota. Hired the mules. Packed the drugs. Figured out all the disguises.

“You were only supposed to bring in six,” said Omar, frowning as he checked the glassine bags.

“Yeah, well I haggled them down,” said Tony.

“You’re not supposed to make deals,” snapped Omar. “You just do the transport.”

“I don’t think Frank’ll throw out the other two kilos, do you?”

Nothing more was said about it, though relations between them remained barely polite if not strained. It was growing increasingly clear to Tony that Omar was nothing more than a middleman. He brought in men for various operations, but good men were not exactly hard to find, with the pool of new blood from Cuba. Everyone else did the legwork and the mulework. Omar just seemed to sit at home, making telephone calls every couple of days to Frank. Tony was annoyed that he’d had no chance to speak to Frank himself since the night they’d talked at the Babylon Club. The first half of the fifty thousand was paid promptly, in crisp new twenties and fifties, but Omar was the contact.

Worse than that, Tony had had no word of Elvira in almost three weeks. The day after he met her, he was talking to his sister on the phone, and it turned out Gina was best friends with the girl who worked daily for Frank Lopez. This Beatriz had reported that Elvira left that morning on a Caribbean cruise. So Tony couldn’t follow up their meeting with a call. Beatriz had promised to alert Gina as soon as Elvira returned, but apparently there’d been no word. Tony had no one to talk to about it. The whole subject freaked Manolo out, and nobody else could be trusted not to tell Frank.

He’d been glad of the chance to go to Colombia, just to get his mind on something else. For a few days after he returned he was busy around the clock, dealing out the shipment. Nick the Pig had been brought in on Tony’s recommendation, to do the package delivery in the ghettos. Frank had been using a two-bit redneck who watered down his stuff and screwed his clients so bad the market had virtually shriveled up. Nick had a solid list of rich black pimps, and Tony went with him when he made his route, in order to get acquainted with the regulars.

Tony enjoyed the delivery phase, because it gave him access to so many different worlds. He and Manolo were sent one morning to a brokerage house in the financial district. They were ushered into the plush office of a hotshot junior partner, Mr. Reeves, where they turned over a manila envelope with twenty-eight grams in it. Mr. Reeves himself would do the distribution among his own people. He handed over a personal check to Tony, laughing as he checked his package, clearly feeling he was part of a great and dangerous adventure. Tony got him talking about the market, asking a hundred questions of his own about investments.

He delivered to two law firms and a judge’s chambers. He dealt ten grams to the maitre d’ of a class A restaurant in one of the big hotels, who insisted that Tony sit down for a lobster dinner. People were always delighted to see their dealer, assuming they were all paid up. They liked Tony right away, because he was so much more presentable than most of the goons Omar employed. He didn’t make them feel they were dealing with a gangster. His manner was suave, his dark good looks memorable. They told him things about themselves. He seemed to want to hear everyone’s story.

Within two weeks he had dealt two kilos himself, with Manolo assisting, and received the second payment on the fifty thousand. Omar had swallowed his personal problems with Tony, since all reports from the field were so positive. As Omar turned over the checks to Tony, he indicated that Frank was prepared to let him do the next Colombia run as well, with a good chance now that the work would be regular, say a run every six or eight weeks. If Tony worked steady from run to run, he’d gross maybe a quarter of a million a year.

Not bad, considering that just two months ago he was making twenty-four dollars a night washing dishes.

Tony and Manolo moved out of the hooker’s apartment into something much more substantial, two bedrooms and a balcony with a view out over Biscayne Bay. Fifteen hundred a month, furnished. No lease, of course, since in their business a man could be broke or busted overnight. There were landlords who were sensitive to these variables, and they charged a little bit more, say thirty percent above the market, but they asked no questions at all.

Already they had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. Manolo filled a closet full of clothes and went out on dates nearly every night, treating his friends to dinner at the Havanito Restaurante. Chi-Chi, whose cut was a good deal smaller, spent most of it buying back drugs off the street. He lived in a squalid little room off Calle Ocho and freebased the night away. Tony did a lot of flashy shopping of his own and sent racks of beautiful clothes to Gina, but he knew he was hoarding his money for something. He was waiting for Elvira to come back, to see what would turn her on.

It was while Tony was down in Bogota on his second trip that Manolo met Gina. She came by the apartment to show off a dress Tony had sent over. They only spent a shy ten minutes together, but Manolo neglected to mention it when Tony returned. It was Gina who blurted it out on the phone, pumping Tony with questions about his easygoing sidekick. Tony was curt. When he hung up he went right to Manolo and confronted him with it.

“She’s not for you, chico,” he said. “I don’t want her mixed up with a guy who might get chewed up by a chainsaw. You dig?”