White Shadow (18 page)

“Why does this type thing always happen when you’re headed home?” she asked.

“You must be working late.”

“Sure.”

“Any more on Wall?”

I turned to her and smiled. She smiled back.

“I read your birdseed story,” she said. “We had a lot of fun with that in the newsroom.”

My smile turned downward. “Come again?”

“Ed Dodge is having fun with you.”

I shrugged. “We’ll see.”

The bodies were heaved onshore, and the
Times
and
Tribune
photographers snapped off shots of the detectives going through the dead men’s pockets. Ed Dodge didn’t look at the camera, but Fred Bender made a great show of winking at the newsmen as he held up a dead man’s wallet like it was a prize fish he’d caught.

“Shouldn’t be much longer now.”

She was wearing a high-waisted blue skirt with pleats, the long kind that had pockets, and a tight-fitting blue cotton shirt that rolled far up on her arms. I kicked at the shells on the side of the bay. A few cars roared past on the Gandy on the way over to St. Pete. I could hear their radios coming from open windows.

“I guess we’ll both be up early tomorrow,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Charlie’s funeral.”

“Right.”

We watched Bender and Dodge talk for several moments, and then a city ambulance backed toward them, making the cops’ faces red in the glow of the taillights. After a while, Pete Franks walked over to us with his own notebook, studying the pages and figuring out what he wanted to tell us and how much we needed to know.

Eleanor still had time to make tomorrow’s paper.

The
Times
would have sloppy seconds after lunch, and my job would be to bust my ass and get something more on the dead men while at the same time write something big for 1-A about Charlie’s service.

“I can’t give you much,” he said.

I blew out my breath and looked at Eleanor.

“Why?” she asked.

“We got to let their families know.”

“So, later tonight.”

“I doubt it.”

I smiled, thrilled we’d have a jump on the
Tribune
with the Blue Streak.

“No problem,” I said. “I’ll be down in the morning.”

“Pete,” Eleanor said. “What gives?”

“We got to let their families know.”

“You’re not doing that right now?” she asked.

“They’re not from around here.”

“Where are they from?” she asked. “We got three dead men found shot and dumped by Gandy Bridge for all the family folk to see as they head to the beach, and you won’t give me more than that?”

“They’re Cubans,” he said.

I nodded.

Eleanor looked at me and I looked at her, because, in ’55, three dead Cubans—even if they were wearing matching suits—wouldn’t have been a priority for the police department, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be tramping around the mangroves trying to document every twisted branch holding the men’s bodies unless they were important.

“Who are they related to?” Eleanor asked.

Franks shook his head. “That’s it.”

“Jesus, Pete.”

“Listen,” he said, leaning into us and beginning to whisper. “If you tell anyone I told you this, I’ll deny it. But if you happen to write in the paper tomorrow that the men we found happened to be cops, I wouldn’t exactly call you up and bless you out.”

“Cuban cops?” I asked.

“Detectives from Havana.”

“Did you know they were here?” she asked.

Franks looked at me and shook his head. “Nope.”

THERE WAS A FINE VIEW of the bay from the terrace at the Presidential Palace in Havana as Santo Trafficante and George Raft stood outside against the marble banisters, smoked cigars, and talked about a picture Raft had made in ’43 called
Background to Danger,
with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Santo told Raft he’d seen those two men on the late show in Tampa a few months back in
The Maltese Falcon,
and that he really liked them together. A good pairing, Santo said.

“You know they offered me that picture.” Raft said, more to himself than asking a question. He smoked on his cigar and looked across the circle where war monuments stood and where two stray dogs trotted aimlessly.

Santo had heard the story and was sorry the minute he’d mentioned the picture. But he was talking this morning just for the sake of talking and knew that Raft loved going on and on about when he was on top and not just a smiling greeter at a Cuban casino.

“This picture I made last year with Edward G. Robinson for United Artists ain’t half bad,” Raft said. “I mean it’s just a gun-and-dame kind of movie, but people still like that stuff. They get tired of all those westerns, with killing without blood and love stories where no one ever really has any chemistry.”

A boy called the two men to let them know that El Presidente was ready for them, and the men—both dressed in dark suits, Santo in charcoal and Raft in pinstripes—walked into the Salon de los Espejos, a long hall of mirrors lined with ceiling frescoes and lamps and fixtures from Tiffany’s in New York. They followed the boy—all in starched white—up a small winding marble staircase to the third floor and the wing where Fulgencio Batista kept a bedroom.

El Presidente was still in bed when the men entered and they stood formally, hands laced behind their backs, while the boy introduced them, and Batista nodded and nodded, still reclined in the double king bed, sipping a small cup of coffee with a silk sleep mask pushed back on his oil-slicked hair.

A young woman—maybe nineteen or seventeen—plumped the satin pillows behind him and took away a tray that lay over his lap. Batista, in red-and-blue silk pajamas, smiled at the girl and joked with the men in English.

“Pretty, eh?” he said. “Better than your girls in Hollywood, Georgie.”

He loved to call Raft “Georgie,” and Raft didn’t seem to mind. “She’s going to be Miss Cuba,” Batista said. “And from there, Miss Universe.”

The girl smiled with a lazy ease, her hair all done up in short black curls like Jane Russell, with thick black eyebrows and large gold hoop earrings. She wore a gauze-thin knee-length robe and nothing underneath. Santo never took his eyes off the president, while Raft’s eyes wandered a good bit.

Santo had known him for years, the man having been a friend of his father’s when he used to do business in Havana. The two spent much time talking about the future from Batista’s house in Daytona Beach where he’d briefly lived in exile.

But Santo’s old man never trusted Batista and often called him a weak-minded mutt behind his back. Santo thought about that while he watched Batista smile and joke about his teenage mistress to the old movie star, Raft, while Santo noticed again the man’s dark, almost negro dark, skin and his thin Asian eyes.

“She can get a deal, Georgie,” Batista said. “With Universal Pictures. What do you think about that? A movie contract. Six months. Five thousand dollars a month. What do you say?”

“I say you better keep her from entering that pageant,” Raft said with a crooked grin. “You can bet that little girl is going to win and leave this little palace.”

“Little? What do you call little?” Batista said, laughing, his voice booming along the marble walls. Batista called for the boy and asked him to bring him a cold, wet towel that he immediately stuck across his brow and leaned back into the silk pillows. His mistress joined him and feathered his face with her long fingers and sharp red nails. “Too much champagne,” he said. “Too much.”

Raft cracked a grin at Santo, who did not smile. He just stood there in his crew cut, watching the dictator through his professor glasses, and waited in an awkward silence for the man to get on with it. Fully expecting to be summoned here about renegotiating the cut of the Capri when the Capri was finished. (Santo was the only member of the Syndicato who got sliced only ten percent. Even Lansky got taken for thirty percent. But Santo never asked for help from Cuba, only the pleasure of doing his business in the man’s country.)

As the girl, dark-skinned and shiny-haired, with that youthful vitality that made a man wish he was much younger, touched and stroked Batista’s face, the edge of her robe fell open and a full, ample dark Cuban breast hung loose and exposed. The nipple wide and thick as a strawberry.

No one said a word, and the woman continued to stroke the man’s face as she looked with heat at George Raft.

“Santo,” Batista said. “I need something from you.”

“Of course.” There was no other answer, not because Santo was a brownnoser to this Cuban man who loved medals and uniforms and pretending he was a real soldier, but because he was a Latin, too, and when a man asked you for a favor it was no small thing. It was a deeply personal way of starting a conversation even as you’re being stroked by a beautiful young whore.

“I had three men go to your city, to Tampa, to find a girl,” he said. “You know this.”

Santo listened.

“And they were killed.”

“Yes,” he said.

“They were murdered,” he said. “By this crazy, wild girl.”

The girl said, low and throatily, “Lucrezia.” She was still looking at Raft. Her eyes were the color of coffee.

“What did your people say? What do they know?”

“They were in bad shape,” he said. “They died, and we had to leave them.”

“They were found in a swamp.”

Santo shrugged.

Batista moved the damp towel to his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. He breathed for a while, and Santo assumed he was in deep thought or asleep. The room fell silent, and Raft tipped his head, keeping eye contact with the girl.

“Santo?” Batista asked.

He waited.

“The girl. I need you to find this wild girl.”

“Who is she?”

“My boy has what you need for that. You will find her?”

“If she’s in Tampa. Sure.”

There was silence, and Santo was very ready to leave because the big glass windows to the Presidential Palace were open, letting in all that humidity and heat that would bake Havana before the day was over. He wanted to get back into his orange Cadillac, where Jimmy Longo waited for him, reading a paper, with the air conditioner throttled up to sixty degrees.

“Do you not want to ask why we were looking for her?”

“No,” Trafficante said, flatly.

“She killed my friend. A general here. A very good friend of many years. Don’t you want to ask why?”

“Why?”

“Carmella, my head has grown hot, and this towel is not so cool.” The girl got up, realizing her exposed breast, and tucked it back into her robe before walking into a large bathroom and running the water. “Come close.”

Santo walked nearer.

“This girl in Tampa is a child of the Moncada Barracks. You understand. I am not afraid of them or anyone. See? I am not afraid of this loudmouth Castro. He is weak and crazy. But we made many, many enemies afterward. I only asked one thing of my friend, the one who the girl killed. I asked him to kill ten rebels for every Cuban soldier killed. And he did this for me.”

“She is a rebel?”

“Worse. She was one of their children.”

Batista swabbed his face. “I will care for this mess, but I will not create another one. You fight them and they will come back stronger. You pretend they don’t exist and they go away. Is this not true?”

“Not always in my experience.”

Batista laughed at that. “You Sicilians. You never let anything go. I will strike when things need to be dealt with, but I refuse to make heroes of these people. Please take care of the girl, quietly. Make her please just go away.”

Batista leaned back into his pillow and pulled the sleep mask over his eyes.