Scarface (2 page)

What were they doing here? There must have been some mistake. What kind of propaganda was this?

The demonstrators had seen them now. They shook their placards and crowded forward, grumbling with scorn and ridicule. The hollow men stood in ranks beside the trucks, staring ahead unblinking as the guards cut away the dead ones. The police held the students back, till they stood face to face with the line in chains. And the grumbling stopped. And the placards fell like broken kites. For the holiday was done.

Out on the end of the dock, an immigration official spelled out the procedure for the third time to the red-faced captain of a forty-foot boat called “Shangri-La,” out of Sarasota. “We have you down for four families,” explained the official. “This means you will take twenty anti-socialists as well.”

“Listen, I can’t handle thirty-five people on this boat. You want me to sink?”

“That is not an immigration problem,” replied the other coolly. “The formula’s fixed in Havana. Take it or leave it.”

The captain had no choice. He came as a conquering hero, savoring the hero’s welcome that awaited him back in Florida. He couldn’t return empty-handed. Hordes of anxious relatives paced the port of Miami, praying for the safe return of the so-called “Freedom Flotilla.” The captain cast an anxious glance along his shining deck. Inside the main cabin the luncheon table was set for six and getting cold. As long as they encountered no turbulence, he thought. The sky was blank, without a shred of cloud. As long as the refugees stayed where they were told.

“All right,” he murmured to the bored official, trying to remember where he’d stowed his gun. Wondering what the hell these commies meant by anti-socialists.

Back by the trucks, a sergeant of police went methodically down the line, unlocking the manacles at each man’s wrists. As he passed among them he spoke in a surly undertone, scarcely pausing to draw a breath. “Go on,” he sneered, “go suck the tit of the bitch-whore America, you ugly bag of garbage. See what they do to you there. You’ll starve in the streets, you pigs.”

On and on he cursed them, rhythmic as a priest passing out the sacrament. None of the men gave a flicker of response, for fear he would not release their cuffs. The students watched with a kind of horrible fascination. For a moment pity was in their eyes. But somehow the contemptuous words of the sergeant taunted and teased them, till finally they came to their senses. They began to whisper to each other out of the corners of their mouths. “Convicts,” they said. “Traitors. Killers. Perverts.”

Soon they were jeering out loud, calling across the no-man’s-land that separated them from the men in chains. The sergeant grinned when he heard the chorus, and his rabid curses came faster and sharper. He had freed perhaps fifty men from their chains. A hundred more stood waiting, while others still spilled from the final trucks. The free ones looked as chained as ever. They stared across at the shouting students, not sure they hadn’t been brought here to be lynched.

The last truck disgorged its shame. These had to be dragged out by the guards. They emerged like frightened animals, unchained because the chains were all inside them. They wore hospital gowns. They carried their dim belongings in pitiful bundles. These were the hopeless mad, and as soon as the students saw them, the fury of the curses grew. “Send them away!” the demonstrators cried. A shiver of exultation was in their shouting now. At last they could rid the state of all its tainted blood. Send away the sick. Send away the old. There was no end to what they could purge.

The sergeant’s eyes gleamed as he came to the next prisoner in line. Before he inserted his key he yanked the chain, and the manacles cut so deep that a ring of blood blossomed at either wrist. The convict clenched his jaws, but he gave no cry. “You too, Scarface,” sneered the sergeant. “Go lick the feet of the millionaires. Let them grind their boots in that scum face of yours.”

With that he flicked the key—once, twice—and the manacles fell to the dock. And the scarfaced one, in the young angry prime of his life, kicked back his head and laid a full wad of spit in the sergeant’s eyes.

“Fuck you and fuck Castro,” growled Tony Montana.

The sergeant went white. The spit coursed down his cheeks like crocodile tears. He drew back his fist and landed a punch square on Montana’s cheekbone, just at the tip of the scar. Montana didn’t even seem to feel it. A curl of a smile touched his upper lip as he spoke again: “And fuck your Communism up the ass.”

The quaking sergeant let fly with a second punch, an uppercut to the jaw. Montana hardly winced. He turned his head to the side and spit out a tooth and a mouthful of blood. The sergeant was crazy. He shoved Montana back, meaning to get him behind the truck so he could beat him to a pulp. But suddenly a rough hand clamped down on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Leave it alone,” snarled the captain of police. “Let’s get them on the boats.”

Reluctantly, the sergeant turned once more to the line of manacled men. The captain shouted through a bullhorn at those who were already free, ordering them to the end of the dock. “Keep your papers in your left hand,” he commanded. “Once you set foot on a boat, you are no longer a citizen of this country. If you lose your papers, the Americans will shoot you.”

The convicts moved along the pier, the students heckling on all sides. Most of these men had been in solitary, some for as long as five years, but they fell naturally into groups and gangs, banding together the way they did in the exercise yard or down in the mess. They weren’t friends, exactly. Any one of them would have killed the man beside him for an extra packet of cigarettes. Yet they knew that safety lay in numbers, and nobody wanted to board a boat without some men he knew to back him up. They were going into enemy territory. They needed to be an army.

Only Tony Montana walked alone. Even in his broken cardboard shoes, his grimy shirt pocked with holes, his shaved head and his prison-gray skin, he walked like a prince, the rock of the hips and shoulders like a panther. His eyes were so pure in their fury, they looked as if they could burn through steel. He was twenty-five and rock-hard. He had made no alliances during his five years in jail, because he didn’t need a blessed thing.

None of the other convicts had ever made a move on him. They gave him a wide berth, because they knew the type. A man who was going to explode one day, muscle and tissue and brain, a man who could live or die, take it or leave it, kill or be killed. The long thin scar that zigzagged down his cheek like a bolt of lightning made men shrink and touch their faces, terrified of pain. Now and then you saw a man in jail who was born with nothing to lose. A man like that didn’t make deals. He didn’t sleep, and he didn’t dream. He just waited for the next chance. And when it finally came, he’d kill the whole world if it stood in his way.

When Tony Montana reached the crowd at the end of the dock, his quick eyes took in the whole operation. A dozen refugees were already huddled on the deck of the first yacht in line. While the captain bellowed in protest, a score of convicts was led to the gangplank. The captain wouldn’t let them on till the guns had been brought up from below. He even demanded manacles, but the immigration men stood belligerent. As the argument raged back and forth, Tony Montana wanted no part of it. He knew he would land in Miami branded as an undesirable if he went over on one of the rich men’s boats. He looked out to the harbor, beyond the yachts, searching among the American fleet for something big and ugly, where a captain wouldn’t be so discriminating. His eyes picked out a fishing tub, proudly flying the stars and stripes. If he could just wait for that one, he thought—

“Hey, Tony,” called a friendly voice beside him.

His fists clenched as he turned. He found himself face to face with a grinning man about two years younger than he—darkly handsome, lean and tightly muscled, with an irrepressible laugh and a streak of nervous energy that made him seem to dance in place, like a fighter. He thrust out his hand. Montana made no move to take it.

“Same old Tony, huh?” said the stranger with a laugh, withdrawing his hand but taking no offense. “Manolo Ray. The little fox, remember? I’m your fuckin’ cousin.”

Montana cocked his head. His eyes darted left and right, as if to make sure nobody had witnessed his being called by name. Then he looked Manolo up and down, noting how the younger man managed to look dapper, even in prison rags. Somehow he had convinced somebody not to shave his head. Montana could tell he hadn’t been in long. He still had a little color.

“So what you been doin’, kid?” he asked in a voice that was oddly gentle.

“I been over Guantanamo, workin’ on a gang. They gimme two years for stealin’ a car. Hell, it was ready for the junkheap. Fuckin’ thing broke down right in front of a police station.” Manolo threw back his head and laughed, as if his own bad luck never kept him from enjoying a good story. “I heard they was shippin’ guys out to the States, so I ask the warden if I can go. He says I ain’t bad enough. You gotta be scum of the earth. I’m scum of the earth, I tell him. He says no dice. Cost me six hundred bucks to convince him. How ’bout you, Tony? Where you been?”

“You still talk too much,” Montana said.

“Yeah, sure,” replied the other with a grin. “You want to make somethin’ of it?”

For a moment Montana’s face went blank, the blank men had kept their distance from for years. This was how he looked when he pulled a trigger. There must have been a hundred men in the crowd who’d have scrambled for cover if they’d seen him then. But they would have been wrong. All of a sudden he broke into a grin that was the mirror image of Manolo’s. And he said: “Nope.”

With that they fell into step beside each other and sauntered down the dock like a couple of swells out for an outing. The hundred men who’d have fled in terror at the look on Tony Montana’s face would have learned something very important about him if they’d watched his meeting with Manolo Ray. For it wasn’t just when he pulled a trigger. Montana went blank like a man disarmed when he cared about somebody. Just for a second, all his panther manner disappeared. He was defenseless. If someone had only seen it, he would have had something on Tony Montana. But nobody saw it.

“What boat we on?” Manolo asked him, as they sat on a coil of rope and watched the convicts file onto one vessel after another. Montana nodded out to the harbor, where the battered trawler rode the sluggish tide, waiting its place in line. Manolo, who had been staring greedily at the yachts, winced with sudden dismay. “Huh? You gotta be kiddin’.”

“Better to be with a mob,” Montana said, figuring the trawler would hold a couple of hundred easily. “We don’t want to stick out.”

“Well, I hope you can swim, amigo, ’cause that thing looks like it already sank.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get there,” Montana replied, his jaw set grimly as he gazed out over the water, past the harbor light.

“What the hell we gonna do when we get there?”

“Get rich,” said the other quietly. An astonished look was in his eyes, as if he’d never spoken such a thing out loud. Perhaps he didn’t know it till he said it.

“Hey, I’m with you,” cried Manolo Ray, clapping his hands three times and thrusting a fist in the air in a gesture of triumph. “Hey, Cousin Tony, we gonna get us a yacht?”

“Everything, pal,” said Tony Montana, his eyes still fixed on the far horizon. The chaos around him had vanished. He smiled at the open sea like an admiral. He clapped a hand on Manolo’s shoulder. “We’re gonna get us every fuckin’ thing there is.”

They weren’t really cousins. They grew up in the same Havana slum, in tarpaper shacks that lined an alley indistinguishable from a thousand others. The two boys were drawn together because neither one had a father. Both men had died in the revolution. Died on the right side, at least, in bloody guerrilla skirmishes high in the mountains. Their widows were due a string of medals and a proper pension, but only the medals had ever arrived. The slum alleys didn’t look any different under Castro than they had under Batista. It was still just rice and beans, with now and then a hunk of dogmeat. The history they taught in the schools was changed, but nobody from the alleys ever went to school. The only thing a slum kid could aspire to be was a soldier. The good money that had filtered down in the old regime—to the pimps, the hustlers, the whores, the pickpockets—was gone with the gringo tourists and the high-roll gamblers.

When he was ten years old, Tony Montana loved nothing better than to sit in his mother’s tiny kitchen, listening to his grandfather talk of the old days. The old man had worked as a doorman at the Cristobal Beach Hotel. When he spoke of the playboys and chorus girls, the Bentleys and the diamond chokers, he went into a kind of trance. He held up his head in a lofty way, and his gestures were grand, his manner elegant, as if he too had swept in every evening to lose a fortune at baccarat. Had Castro had spies in Mrs. Montana’s kitchen, they would have arrested the old man as a genuine anti-socialist. Tony knew it had to be a secret between him and his grandfather. But his head grew full of visions, and he knew even then he would never rest till he found that lost and magic world again.

By the time he was twelve he had started to learn his trade. He and Manolo would take the bus to the garden quarters of the city, where the bureaucrats and the generals lived in the houses of the rich who’d fled the revolution. The two boys would talk their way into somebody’s house, pretending one of them was sick. While the lady of the house administered bicarbonate of soda to Manolo, Tony would dart through the rooms and pick up whatever he could stuff in his shirt. The two boys came home from the suburbs laden down with bud vases and china figurines, little madonnas and cigarette boxes. Now and then Tony would bestow a trinket on his sister Gina, six years old, but he knew his mother would have turned him over to the local priest for punishment if she’d ever found out. So he horded his loot in the crawl space under the shack, counting it up like a king in his treasure-house, till he outgrew childish things.

They graduated to picking pockets. Manolo would sit on a bench in the fountained park in front of the shuttered art museum, sobbing as if his heart would break. When somebody stopped to comfort the child, Tony would slip out of the bushes and lift a wallet or snatch a purse. They made a fair amount of money this way, enough to keep them in beer and cigarettes, but somehow it never satisfied Tony. If he was going to steal, he wanted to steal from the rich. Pearls and gold watches and thick folds of cash—that’s what he itched to grab hold of. He wasn’t long for a people’s republic.