Scarface (6 page)

It seemed like a joke. All right, the cop had seen him red-handed through the window, but it was only half a franc’s worth of candy. Tony could hardly believe he was being led to the station. As they bore down the street, the gendarme tugging Tony along by his cuffed hands, Tony threw back his head and laughed at the craziness of it all. He wasn’t even worried when they fingerprinted him and stuck him in a detention cell with a lot of drunks and pimps. Tony Montana was a secret now. They couldn’t possibly stick him with a ten-cent crime.

But they left him there for a week, till he started to fight with the drunks and pimps and hollered at the guards. He finally thought he’d got somewhere when a fleshy man in a self-important suit came swaggering down the hall and let him out. Tony began to complain about his rights, and the man cuffed his ear and sent him sprawling. “Shut up, Tony Montana,” he sneered. “You got a one-way ticket to Havana, compliments of the French government. Save your breath for Castro.”

All the way back in the plane, Tony kept revolving it over and over in his mind. He couldn’t believe they’d tracked down who he really was. He thought Tony Montana had disappeared in the hills of Angola. Tony Montana had died on a ship in the mid-Atlantic. It was something to learn, that the world had a network subtle enough to pick up a nobody. Your store of treasures didn’t help you a bit, nor your best disguises, nor all the princely women who’d told you the story of their lives.

It was the last thing he would learn about the world for the next five years. Back in Havana they put him on trial for twenty minutes—desertion—and then he was sentenced to twenty years. Twenty years was life these days. Nobody lived past forty in a Cuban jail, not since the revolution. Tony Montana, the one they would call Scarface, was led away in a stunned silence. The key that turned in the lock was forever.

Only Tony Montana himself knew there would be a next chance. He couldn’t have learned what he’d learned for nothing. A man who had a destiny had to have three chances. And so he waited, month after month. He needed no one. He wanted nothing. All he knew was this: his apprenticeship was done. When he next got out he would own the world, or leave it in ashes before they’d ever take him again.

Chapter Two

T
HE WIND HAD been rising all night in the Florida Straits. By dawn the waves were fifteen feet, and only the barest bruise of day got through the moiling clouds. Lightning shot the sea, and the thunder fell like bombs. The trawler had gone astray about two
A.M.
, but the captain didn’t find out till after five, when he came up to relieve the drunken sailor nodding in the wheelhouse. Now the captain sat at the shortwave, probing a break in the static. With so many overfilled boats in the Straits, he doubted the Coast Guard would answer a “Mayday.” But he knew every groan in his ship, and it felt like she might break up from the strain and the extra weight. He had a boat for maybe sixty. There were two hundred and thirty-four people aboard.

Most of the refugees were huddling on the deck. They held to their families in pitiful clumps, the thin blankets tented about them soaking wet from the spray of the waves. A toothless retard, half-naked, his shirt draped around his head, capered around the deck, giggling and pointing a finger at the storm. The men with their families shoved him away, and he caromed from group to group, spinning his laugh like an incantation. Every time the ship rose up on an angry swell, a chatter like a tribe of monkeys rose from the crowd on deck. There was panic, but they didn’t dare move for fear they would be thrown overboard.

Tony stayed close to Manolo, right up at the prow of the ship. The younger man lay curled and shivering on the anchor chain. He’d been vomiting his guts out all night long. At each heave of the ship he groaned and cursed, but softly, like a man praying. He had no strength left to shout. Tony, meanwhile, leaned out over the rail of the ship, dousing his face in the sea spray. He laughed at the power of the storm. He almost seemed to be urging it to greater heights, shouting into the wind as if he was master of the revels. He dropped to Manolo’s side and shook him.

“Whatsa matter, chico?”

“I wish I was back in my cell,” said Manolo, moaning through gritted teeth. “I miss the cockroaches.”

“Hey, babe, this is good for you. Clean out your system. In a month you’ll be eating lobster. Steaks this thick,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger four inches apart.

Manolo retched. With a shaking hand he fingered a small Negrito charm on a chain around his neck. “We’ve had it, Tony,” he whispered. “Yemaya is angry with us.”

“Oh shit, not you,” retorted Tony with disdain. He’d managed to duck the Afro-Catholic malarkey all the while he was growing up, but the prisons were rife with it. Men in cages needed their mystic fix. Tony looked down at the cheap glass charm—Chango, god of fire and thunder, his sharp teeth glinting, his eyes rolling deliriously, head crowned in gold. Chango had no power on the sea. The sea was Yemaya’s kingdom.

“Help me, Tony, while we still got time. All we need’s a pin. Little rouge—little eye shadow. Ask one o’ them broads.” His trembling hand gripped Tony’s shirt. He was practically crying.

“Knock it off!” cried Tony, pulling away. “I don’t go for that mystical shit. It’s your fear talking, chico. You make your own fate. There’s no such thing as gods. You hear me?”

As if in answer, the mainmast shuddered and began to crack. Planks flew up from the deck, and deep in the belly of the ship timbers began to rend. The captain came scrambling out of the wheelhouse. He looked up at the mast and slowly crossed himself. The refugees had scattered from their huddles. Screaming and stampeding, they raced for the rails. Their eyes were riveted on the quaking mast, trying to gauge where it would fall. A huge wave broke on the starboard side, sucking ten people into the sea.

Manolo rose to his knees and drummed his fists on Tony’s hip. “See what you did!” he bellowed. “Yemaya heard you! Take it back!”

Tony stood with his feet apart, his gaze wild as he searched the deck. He seemed to be the only one still upright. The others just clung to the rails and pleaded at the sky. Those who’d lost their relatives to the surging of the waves raged and gnashed their teeth. Nothing could comfort them. Tony saw a couple of sailors cutting free the lifeboats below the wheelhouse, close under the swaying and splintering mast. He reached down and dragged his raving cousin to his feet.

“You shut up now, chico. We’re getting off this tub.”

He gripped Manolo about the shoulders, and they lurched across the heaving deck. Another wave hit them broadside. Tony and Manolo went sprawling, and another handful of refugees tumbled into the sea. One of the lifeboats sprang loose from its fittings and slid down the deck. Only one boat still held in its ropes, ready to be launched to the open water. Tony crawled to it, one hand gripping Manolo’s collar. The younger man had passed out.

The mast came down with a shattering roar, crushing the wheelhouse, cutting a horrible swath along the port side of the prow. Several refugees were pinned. Others were knocked in the water. Now they could hear the tearing down below, as the bones of the ship broke up and the sea began to pour. Tony hauled Manolo into the lifeboat. He beckoned to several people at the rail, but they were in shock. Only the quick and the strong made their desperate way to the safety of the dory. Ten or twelve had clambered in when the last rope snapped, flinging the lifeboat over the side. It smashed into the water.

Tony grabbed the rudder. One of the sailors took the oars. The sea was so rough, they were pulling away from the trawler fast. The air was thick with the shriek of refugees, as those in the water struggled to stay afloat. Several of the men in the lifeboat reached out over the sides to the women and children, hauling aboard perhaps twenty in the first chaotic minutes. Tony tried to keep steering in a circle, but a wave would nearly swamp them and toss them aside. When he next caught sight of the trawler, it was a couple of hundred yards away. It still held together, but even in the gale-force wind Tony could hear the wail of surrender rising from its deck.

A strange and giddy laugh made Tony turn his head. The toothless retard had just been fished from the water. Practically naked, he stood in the lifeboat and clapped his hands, swaying to the beat of the storm as if it was music. Everyone else looked half-dead with grief and exhaustion. An angry sailor, outraged to hear such levity, grabbed the retard around the neck and made as if to toss him back in the water. Only a brutal cry from Tony managed to stop him. The retard subsided and sank to the floor of the boat.

There was nobody left in the water. Though they peeled their eyes and circled about, they saw nothing in the stormy waves. It was as if Yemaya had sucked them down to her dark cave at the bottom. Tony’s jaw was grim as he looked at the pitiful band of survivors—twenty-five, thirty at most, in a boat that would have held fifty. Manolo stirred below him and opened his eyes. He looked around gravely at the shivering refugees, then up at Tony. His eyes asked the question he couldn’t speak:
We gonna make it?
Tony nodded.

Suddenly one of the sailors let out a cry. He was pointing at something far out in the water. Tony squinted into the wind till he saw it: a boy, holding tight to a scrap of timber, bobbed up and down in the waves. In a flash Tony had shifted course, and the sailor at the oars poured on his strength. A shout of hope went up in the boat. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the figure of the boy. It was as if they could endure their losses if only they could be granted this one small reprieve.

The boy had seen them now. They shouted and waved encouragement as the lifeboat closed the distance. Manolo manned a second pair of oars. It seemed they would make it in time, in spite of the surging waves. They were only fifty feet away. Now Tony could see the look of shock and numbness in the boy’s white face. He had reached the end of his strength, and he didn’t seem able to focus on his rescuers. The refugees kept calling, as if they could will the life back into him. Thirty feet now. Twenty-five. The boy let go of the timber and slipped beneath the surface.

A wail of pain went up in the lifeboat, twin to the wail that rose from the deck of the trawler. The rowers’ faces were beet red as they strained against the sea. the boy’s face broke the surface; one hand clutched the air. Tony roared a curse of rage at the raw, indifferent sky. He suddenly felt he was going to explode. He tore off his shoes, jumped up on the gunwale, and dove into the whirling current.

He hadn’t swum in five years, since the languid days in the harbor at Marseilles. If he’d thought about it, he would have realized there was no way he could swim in such an angry sea. But he didn’t think; he just moved. He reached the spot where the boy went down. He was just visible beneath the surface, adrift and not even struggling now. Tony went under and dragged him up. He was deadweight as he choked to breathe. Tony crawled back toward the boat with his one free arm. All the refugees were shouting with joy. Manolo grinned at the rudder, shaking his head at his crazy friend.

Then the sea did a curious twist, like a woman turning restless in her sleep. Where Tony had been a bare ten feet from the boat, suddenly it was twenty feet. A whirlpool seemed to have caught at the boat, so Manolo couldn’t keep it steady for the rescue. A wave slapped Tony and left him gasping. He realized he hadn’t much strength at all. The boy was conscious, but he couldn’t help. Tony paddled frantically to stay afloat. Over the crest of the waves he could see the lifeboat drifting off. The refugees watched in stunned silence. The cheering had stopped.

The retard stood up in the stern and started to laugh again. They turned on him now as if they would kill him for sure. He thought it was all a game. He pulled from beneath the rear seat an inner tube, black rubber and spattered with patches. He whirled in a pirouette and flung it with all his might. It needed the strength of a madman. The inner tube dropped to the water a couple of yards from Tony. The cords were standing out in Tony’s neck as he groped toward it. In the end the sea took pity on him and waved him the last few feet. He grabbed it. The boy climbed onto it.

A wild hurrah went up in the lifeboat. Manolo had to shout them down, or they would have tipped it over. The retard kept on twirling, lost in a gleeful jig, but Manolo let him go on dancing. He knew good luck when he saw it. He sent up a silent prayer to Yemaya, as he watched Tony clamber up into the tube and settle the boy in his lap. They were drifting further and further off. Tony waved once, and Manolo waved back. They would not meet again till God knew where. But yes, they were going to make it. Nothing could stop them now.

The trawler did not break up. It shipped an enormous amount of water, but it was stubborn, having outlived twenty years of hurricanes in the Straits. Powerless, it drifted west till it ran aground in the Keys. Twenty-nine people were lost overboard, another thirty-two recovered from the lifeboat. It was hard to be sure about the numbers, since the captain’s list was lost when the wheelhouse was crushed. The U.S. agencies had lists of their own, but they’d proven to be notoriously inaccurate. Enormous changes had been made at the last minute, when the boats were being loaded in Havana. In the case of the trawler, they had to trust the refugees themselves for the information. This only made the bureaucratic tangle more of a nightmare than it usually was.