White Shadow (8 page)

When I entered, wrinkled and sweat-dried, the piano man, Tony Kovach, launched into “Invitation,” a song by Bronislaw Kaper from a movie I never saw. The song always reminded me of Fort Holabird and reading files till dawn, with my only company being a midnight disc jockey named Hot Rod Huffman, who’d sometimes doubled as Maurice the Mood Man:
And now, here is music that is not loud, not harsh, not shrill, not putrescent—but music that is soft, beautiful, and sweet: sugarcoated music for you and yours
.

I ordered a whiskey sour and talked to Ann O’Meara and a couple of other reporters who had to take a few minutes to drink, calm down, and let go of all that energy and absorbed violence before they went home to their wives, husbands, and families. Outsiders. People who could not understand the energy and the franticness of the whole thing. I had only a studio apartment on West Hills in Hyde Park, with a small radio, my clothes, a growing stack of
Esquire
magazines, a much-loved
Webster’s
dictionary, and Dave Brubeck albums. I planned to stay for an hour or so.

I might move on to another bar or check back by the
Times
. When you are young and alone, you can wander from place to place. You had nothing keeping you anywhere, and the feeling was powerful, that ability to enter lives—bubbles of existence—interview, take notes, understand, and then walk away.

But I couldn’t leave the thought of Charlie Wall.

“I hear they cut his fucking head off,” Ann O’Meara said, and took a bite of onion from her Gibson. Ann was a plump woman who knew and wrote about the latest fashions and kept a little leather-bound book in her desk of the ins and outs of Tampa society, and had mainly turned to newspaper work because she’d become somewhat bored being a homemaker. And as a newsman, at first thought I might not have liked someone like plump old Ann O’Meara in her imitation Parisian clothes who went on and on about the Palma Ceia Country Club crew and the latest goings-on for Gasparilla (our local kind-of Mardi Gras), but I’d have been wrong. Ann O’Meara was a tough-talking, shrewd woman who knew about every major power broker in this town, and knew their wives a lot better.

“Who said that?” I asked.

“A cop I know,” she said. “Wouldn’t go on the record, though.”

“Bullshit,” said Tom, our City Hall reporter. “He was shot. The whole throat-cutting thing is a ruse. Cops want to pull in some poor bastard who will blurt out that he didn’t shoot him, and then the city cops will lean in and say, ‘How do you know he was shot?’”

“You been watching
Justice
again?” I asked.

“Ha,” Tom said.

“I bet he got his fucking head cut off,” Ann said.

“It all goes back to the Kefauver Commission,” Tom said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s where I’d look,” he said. “Find those transcripts. This doesn’t have a damned thing to do with anything else but bolita.”

“What else is there?” I said.

Bolita was the city’s numbers racket based on the Cuban National Lottery, with locals selling tickets and making the payoffs.

“Did you get to the wife?” I asked.

“No,” Ann said.

“Parkhill?”

“No.”

“Dunn want us in early tomorrow?”

“What do you think,” she said.

The piano man played Gordon Jenkins’s “Goodbye,” while I was on my second drink in that glowing red room with an empty dance floor.

“The cops will never know,” Tom said.

“Why’s that?”

“Ybor City doesn’t talk.”

I nodded.

“Sure they will,” Ann said.

I looked at her.

“You know why?” she said. “Because about forty years ago, Charlie Wall saved those people. I don’t know, maybe it was 1910 or ’11, but look back, and find out about the cigar strikes and the companies trying to starve out all those Cubans, and Mr. Charlie Wall, the son of the mayor turned big-time gambler, using all his money to keep those people eating, so they didn’t have to cave and go back to work until they were goddamned ready.”

“Come on,” Tom said.

“Look it up,” she said. “Why do you think he swung every election back in the thirties? Because of fear? Fear is cheap, my friend. Loyalty among those Latins, now that’s something else. They called him
El Sombre Blanco
. The White Shadow. And when those people got old, their children remembered Mr. Wall—still do—and they will be talking plenty about who slit his throat or shot him, or whatever happened to the bastard.”

“They voted because Charlie Wall paid them,” Tom said.

The song behind Ann’s words was beautiful, and I finished my drink, paid the bartender, and was ready for a nice Chinese meal at the Bay View Hotel when Eleanor Charles walked in the door and had all the men twisting their necks.

She sidled up to the bar. And I ordered another drink.

I smiled.

“Hello, Virginian.” Eleanor was from Georgia, and had a wonderful Southern accent that I always loved.

“Miss Eleanor.”

She was wearing a black skirt with a white blouse, with red-and-yellow vertical stripes and French cuffs. Her hair was very blond and shiny and curled up at the shoulder. She had thick eyebrows, not the painted-on kind so popular at the time, and a face that always reminded me strongly of Grace Kelly. But Eleanor was a reporter, not a starlet, and had ink stains on her fingers and wore black-frame glasses that nearly hid those wonderful brown eyes.

“May I buy you a drink?”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Lord, no,” she said. “I’m still working. We put out a morning paper, Mr. Turner.”

“Then where?”

“Tonight, I’ll want to listen to some Charlie Parker and take my shoes off and stretch out on my sofa and rest off this godforsaken day about that godforsaken man.”

“Ten? Eleven?”

“Eleven,” she said. “God, I hope we’re done by then. Who knows—we might even know the killer.”

“Cute.”

“I don’t joke about that kind of stuff, Virginian.” She turned and then smiled. “Funny running into you here. I was just popping in to see who was about.”

FOUR HUNDRED miles away, at the end of the Calle Obispo in Havana, Santo Trafficante Jr., in his black glasses and graying crew cut, sat down to a lobster plate at the Floridita with an aging movie star best known for playing rogue cops and edgy hit men. Santo was in his midforties, and conservatively dressed in a lightweight khaki suit and brown shoes. He sipped on a Cuba Libre, just to be social, and listened to George Raft talk about a picture he’d just made with Ginger Rogers called
Black Widow
. Of course, Santo knew Raft as the coin-flipping villain in
Scarface,
and as the truck driver in a movie he’d made with Bogart. The man had been making pictures since they invented movie houses.

Jimmy Longo, an associate of Santo’s, big and beefy and uncomfortable with a flowered tie choking his neck, joined them at the white linen table, listening to a young Cuban woman in a red dress singing a song about faded love in Spanish, accompanied by two guitar players and a small boy with maracas. The woman was dark, with a deep voice, and sang as if she knew all about faded love.

Santo missed his wife back home in Tampa. Their two daughters. His mother, newly widowed. Cuba was an amusement park of business, even if it was lobster dinners every night with movie stars and beautiful women in red dresses serenading you.

“This is going to be big, bigger than the Nacional. Bigger than the Tropicana,” Raft said, smiling with a big thick Cohiba plugged in the side of his mouth. “Three hundred and fifty rooms. Twenty-one stories.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Lansky is calling it the Riviera,” Raft said. “He’s got a space right off the Malecón. You’ll be able to see the whole bay from the swimming pool. This place is going to be the finest hotel the world has ever seen. How about that?”

The room was all red velvet, with monogrammed china and silver and tuxedoed waiters who refilled your water glass after every sip. Santo finished up the lobster paella and took another sip of the Cuba Libre. He lit a cigarette and leaned back into the chair. A woman at the next table was talking about seeing Hemingway down at the bar telling a joke about a monkey who could play poker.

“I think this place is going to make Havana overflow,” Raft said. “We wouldn’t have a free room at the Capri. We’re estimating ten million in just the first year.”

“I don’t trust them.”

“Accountants?”

“Estimates.”

Jimmy Longo grew bored with whatever money Raft was trying to pull off his boss for another roulette wheel or another wing of rooms or some kind of special VIP deal that would make the Capri the best. Santo watched the big man lean back in his chair and motion over the waiter for dessert. That’s why he loved the guy. Not because he’d saved his life back in Tampa that time, but because he cared more about coconut Cuban ice cream than big deals and millions.

“Co-co-nut,” Longo said to the water guy. “Ice cream.”

“Helado,”
Santo said.

That’s why he’d made it in Cuba bigger than any of these hoods from New York. He’d grown up in Ybor City, and could switch from Italian to Spanish without thinking and always wondered why others couldn’t do the same.

After dessert, the men wandered out to the street, the palm trees making brushy sounds in the wind. All along the shops, men and women in suits and rags flowed down the narrow brick road—too narrow for cars—buying and selling candy, exotic birds, European suits, eyeglasses, and themselves. The men couldn’t walk five feet without hearing the standard
Tss-tss
from a hidden cove in a closed shop and seeing teenage girls in sequined dresses, faces impossibly made up with a hundred types of rouge and lipstick. Their small breasts pressed and propped for display in low-cut tops.

He saw one about his daughter’s age and it made him sick to his stomach.

Small white lights hung over the narrow brick street, and the night was brisk and cold. Raft kept talking about getting Eartha Kitt for the grand opening of the Capri and tried to make not-so-subtle hints to Santo about increasing the budget so they could make the place even better than what Lansky was building. Not that they were in competition; hell, if one member of the Syndicato hit it big they all did.

Raft and Longo and Santo smiled as they drove ten miles outside the city to the Sans Souci and headed up through the wandering hills and down a palm tree-lined road, where the air through the open windows smelled of salt and burning sugarcane, ending at the front door of the old Spanish villa. A man in a maroon coat held open the door for the men and took them back to the Nevada Room. There, a magician named Mickey, who they’d found in Atlantic City—a brother-in-law to an important family—performed card tricks with two six-foot-tall blondes in pasties while Raft told a story about a man he’d seen perform some kind of show with his two-foot schlong in Chinatown.

Santo wasn’t listening, too intent on watching the man in the tuxedo place the Cuban girl’s head into a guillotine and a carrot under her chin.

“I hear Batista is going to let that Castro fellow go,” Raft said.

Santo turned back to him as the magician set up the trick. “I don’t think that’s a good plan.”

“He’s some kind of hero to these people,” Raft said. “You kill him and they’ll turn him into Jesus Christ.”

Santo cleaned his glasses and slipped them back on his face. The world out of focus, with all the green, blue, and yellow lights of the dim room, and then back clear again.

The blade fell quickly through the guillotine and sliced right through the carrot while leaving one of the blondes—her head seemingly cut clean with a blade—still smiling.

“Sometimes I wonder about all this money, Santo,” Raft said. He dabbed at his perfectly oiled hair in the nightclub light and took a sip of a gin martini. “It’s all sunshine and palm trees and women. But this can’t last. This place is restless as hell.”

“You really worried about Castro?” Santo asked. “Don’t you read the papers? He’s just some kind of bandit.”

“Easy come, easy go,” Raft said. “I made ten million in my life. Spent it all on gambling, booze, and women. The rest I can spend foolishly.”

Raft laughed and laughed at that. A joke he’d told a million times.

Santo had heard it a million and two. But he liked it and liked Raft and liked being in Havana with beautiful girls in pasties with a good, cold Cuba Libre and the healthy flush of a nice tan.

An old couple stopped by the table and asked Raft for an autograph, and he stood and hugged the old woman, talking about what was wrong with the movie business these days.

Longo leaned over and whispered. “They’re looking at Johnny. I don’t know much else. It’s all over the papers.”

Santo heard the drumroll and watched the plump blonde being led into a box with the magician holding her hand. Her thick, white ass jiggled in green panties as she was swallowed into a black box.