Paradise Man (24 page)

He watched her clothes fly about. Paul could get excited by the cotton engineering of a bra.

“I’m ready,” she said, putting on those party shoes.

He looked at her, wondering, she supposed, if it was a trick, a means of seducing him out of Holden’s hiding place and locking herself back in. But it wasn’t a trick. She left with Paul and didn’t even lock the door.

He brought her down into the Cadillac, shoving her suitcase under the jump seat. He signaled to his man, silent Dimitrios, who always drove her to the matinees. And she knew Paul could feel her flesh, her perfume, the polish on her nails and feet, the redness of her shoes, and suddenly, without warning, he held her hand. She didn’t resist; they drove uptown like that, the district attorney and his daughter-in-law.

“F
ROG.”

Holden stirred. He was on a cot in a room he couldn’t recall. He didn’t panic. If he’d found a VCR, he would have closed his eyes and considered himself a happy man. He had an ache above his groin. He looked down and saw a black lotion, thick as pudding, on that side of his body where Jean-Paul had shot him in the street. The pudding stank. Holden wasn’t lost. He’d taken a holiday among the Mariels. But he still couldn’t understand who the hell was calling him Frog.

“Dada. Froggy the Frog.”

He searched between his legs and saw those leopard eyes under a table. He wondered about his wound. What if the bullet hadn’t stopped twisting yet and couldn’t find its home? It was like a satellite that went from station to station in Holden’s guts and could trigger little time explosions. He’d come to kill the Parrot again. He’d discovered a leopard girl under the table. He’d brought her to Goldie ...

“Frog.”

“Stop that,” he said. Holden started to get up, but the pudding leaked and he lay down again. “Barbara, is that you?”

But those animal eyes crept deeper under the table until Holden saw a darkness he’d been used to all his life. He could have been born under a similar table in Avignon. He was the leopard, not the little girl. He’d stalked from the age of two or three. But he hadn’t really become a hunter until he arrived at Aladdin’s door. It was his own father he pursued. He’d been weaving designs around Holden Sr. He was the bumper his daddy should have been. His rise to vice president was like some kind of revenge on the house of Holden. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get close to his dad.

“Querida
, come to me.”

A voice boomed at him. “She’s frightened. You’ve been saying things in your sleep.” Holden was surrounded by flesh. He stared into the tiny, tiny eyes of Huevo’s godmother, Dolores, the fat
madrina
who must have applied the pudding to his wound. Dolores occupied half the room. She swayed with a melodic lilt. Holden’s Carmen Miranda.

“What did I say in my sleep?”

“Wild things. You asked everybody to call you the Frog. You shouted at the little one. You were merciless with her.”

“I’m sorry,” Holden said. “I shouldn’t have shouted at the girl. I love her.”

“I know,” Dolores said.

“Where am I?”

“With Changó,” she said. “You are in our lord’s house.”

“But where?”

And the priestess smiled. “He has many houses, Holden. And it’s not so gracious to ask. He has tended your wounds. Our lord takes care of melancholy people like yourself.”

“I smile when I have to smile,” Holden said in his own defense. He looked around for chicken heads, cauldrons, and mounds of rust, but there were no signs of the god. Changó had a cot and a table in his room.

“You must be in mourning,” he said to the
madrina.

She laughed so loud, the table shivered. “Why?” she asked. “Do I look like a melancholy person?”

“You’ve lost your son.”

“I’ve lost many sons,” she said. “And I will lose more.”

“I understand. But Huevo. He was—”

“Special to me? Yes, Holden. Like my other godsons. And he was arrogant and foolish. He disobeyed our lord.”

“Mother,” Holden said, because he didn’t know how he ought to address a
madrina.
“Huevo wanted to get the
santita
back from Don Edmundo.”

“What
santita
are you saying?”

“The little one,” Holden said, “the little one who’s under the table.”

“She is a girl, señor.”

“Then why do all the Mariels piss in their pants when she rolls her eyes at them?”

“Because they are sinners and she has holy powers.”

“But where does she come from?”

“She comes from Queens.”

“You talk like a district attorney,” Holden said. “Mother, I killed a man and his mistress. I slapped them silly and I found a little girl under a table. No one wants to tell me what she was doing there.”

“Playing,” the
madrina
said.

“Yes, without a mom and dad. And when I asked her, she said you had raised her.”

“I?” the
madrina
said, her enormous body tightening into a screw until it looked like Carmen Miranda was about to dance. “I did not raise her.”

“Pardon me, but she said Dolores, fat Dolores.”

Dolores punched her own chest. “See. I am Chepita. I have a sewing shop and a room for homeless men. I love the saints. And I am in the service of our lord. But I did not raise this child.”

“You’re Dolores,” Holden said. “And you heal gunshot wounds. The homeless men in your room are bandits and bumpers ... like me. Don Edmundo’s been after you for years. But you disappear in thunder and smoke.”

“You have the thunder,” she said. “I was only a nurse.”

Holden felt satisfied. The circuits began to connect. The pudding hardened while he chatted with the
madrina.
“And you were Barbara’s nurse.”

“For a little while,” the
madrina
said.

“What about her parents?”

Carmen Miranda pulled a bitter face. “Bad people. A barber from Havana and his wife. They were mean to the little one. They lent her out to parties. They forced her to sing in a white dress and wear a bride’s veil. Old men put their hands on her, touched her under the dress. The barber hired me to escort his child. He didn’t want anyone to steal her. So I became her bodyguard. Because I was the godmother and the friend of Big Balls, Lázaro Rodriquez. And Lázaro was a thief for hire, without a conscience, subhuman, like all the Mariels. Why would Lázaro complain? He was wanted by the police. The barber could have him for a couple of pesos. A convict, Castro’s filth. But he was a murderer, Holden, not a pimp. We brought the little one to the party in a truck. It was January, and Lázaro wore a white suit. He loved winter in New York ...

The
madrina
was an enchantress, and Holden was like her child. He lay on his cot and listened. Winter, the
madrina
said. The party was in the penthouse of a Cuban lawyer. Lázaro stood in his white suit, a wanted man, among lawyers and doctors who’d never been to jail. They fed him wine and asked him about Taco-Taco and other penitentiaries. Then the little girl sang, clutching candies and flowers and a doll Lázaro had made for her with pieces of wire. She was passed from lawyer to lawyer, like a great stuffed doll, and her own dolly was lost under the heels of an admirer. The lawyers never noticed the blue veins in Lázaro’s head, where the guards at Taco-Taco had kicked him for tattooing convicts without paying them their usual fee. The anger swelled in Lázaro until his skull was like a dark blue lamp, but he allowed the lawyers to fondle the girl. He wouldn’t interfere. He’d been paid to do a job. He took the girl home to the barber and his wife, and while the
madrina
watched, he hissed into their eyes.

“She is not our child,” the barber said. “We borrowed her from an aunt.”

And Lázaro had the barber shave his own head and the head of his wife, then he removed his needle and his dyes from a little sack and decorated their skulls with a swan, the mark of a child molester. The barber delivered his savings to Lázaro. “A dowry,” he said. “For little Tita.”

“Tita? Was she born with that name?”

The barber shrugged. “I don’t know, señor. We called her Tita.”

And he ran to East Miami with his wife. Lázaro had a daughter all of a sudden. He lodged her with Dolores. “We will call her Barbara,” he said.

Santa Barbara was the Marielito saint, the protector of bumpers like Big Balls or Holden and Billy the Kid. Whoever was frightened of thunderstorms or wished for a happy death prayed to Barbara. She was Changó’s Catholic “sister,” his womanly side. And the
madrina
warned Lázaro that he should not burden the little one with Barbara’s name, or Changó might grow jealous.

“It will be a secret,” Lázaro said.

“But you cannot fool our lord,” Dolores told him, while the girl went to live with the Mariels as Changó’s sister saint. She learned prison songs. She sat down during certain ceremonies, where the heart was ripped out of a rooster and blood was sprinkled near the statue of lord Changó, who had a man’s shoulders and a woman’s hips, who laughed with his eyes closed, loved to wear bracelets on his arms and seemed to enjoy the company of little girls. The Bandidos noticed all that. The little girl would sway her hips like Dolores and go into a trance in the middle of a song. And pretty soon she was never absent from a ceremony.

Lázaro made her lots of wire dolls. He put on a disguise and took her to the circus. There were Bandidos in the audience, and they recognized the little girl. They bowed to her ten or fifteen times. They brought her garlands of candy until a fort rose in front of her feet. But Lázaro had to stop attending circuses.

Edmundo’s men began slaughtering the
madrinas
around Lázaro. They set fire to Dolores’ little estates. And Lázaro had to run from hole to hole. He worried about the little girl. He hid Barbara with families that had nothing to do with the war. And because he’d tempted Changó, the
madrina
said, because he’d mocked their lord by making the little girl into a
santita
, one of the families farmed the girl out to a cousin, and the cousin neglected her, left the
santita
in her apartment with a pair of crooks, the Parrot and his mistress, and it was Holden’s luck to find the Parrot with the
santita
under the table.

Lázaro destroyed the family that had rented his child, and he would have destroyed Holden too, but he was concerned that a kind of divinity might be attached to Holden, that Holden was one of Changó’s children, because the god was known to have dozens of brats, and a few of them were pink, like Holden, and Lázaro couldn’t afford to anger the god, so he tested Holden, taunted him, but he couldn’t solve the question of Holden’s divinity. And when he met the bumper in El Norte, looked into those wistful eyes, Lázaro was as confused as ever. He went up to Riverdale with Changó’s red and white
collares,
certain he had a god’s thunder in the firebombs and the pistols under his coat, and landed in a dark field.

“Big Balls,” Holden said from his cot. “He had a lot of character, like Red Mike.”

“He was a fool,” the
madrina
said. “He died chasing Changó’s tail. I have met this Red Michael. Another fool.”

“Mother, I grew up with Mike. But where did you meet him?”

“In a room.”

And Holden remembered the pact Lázaro had made with Red Mike to keep Edmundo out of Queens. And now Edmundo had the borough to himself, with Paul Abruzzi’s blessings. And Holden was the monkey who’d murdered Red Mike and led La Familia to Big Balls. His thunder belonged to Aladdin. He was as much of a chauffeur as his dad had ever been.

“What about the little one?” Holden asked. “Will she ever leave her hideout?”

The
madrina
started to coo in that prison patois the Mariels talked among themselves. The
santita
came out from under the table. She was clutching the mutilated doll Holden had gotten for her off Stumfel’s mountain.

“Froggy,” she said, and Holden frowned.

“All right. I’ll make an exception. I’ll be your frog.”

Had he been dreaming of Avignon? He promised himself that on his next trip to Paris he’d take the bullet train down into Provence and visit that city of popes. But he’d lost his concession in France. Billetdoux would clop him the minute he got off the plane.

“Mother, how long have my lights been out?”

“Which lights?” the
madrina
asked.

“Lights,” Holden said. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Eleven days, on and off. We’ve had to move three times. We’re traveling light. Holden, this is all we have.”

Dolores pointed to the next room and Holden saw two sickly men whose hair had been dyed white. Living among Mariels, he understood that inventory of white hair. White was one of Changó’s primal colors. The white in the eye of a thunderstorm, the red of a rooster’s throat. Dolores’ last two soldiers wore red shoes. But Holden couldn’t stop thinking about white hair. The Parrot and his mistress must have worshipped Changó, with or without
collares.
They couldn’t have been complete strangers to that god. Had they appeared at one of Dolores’
revocacions
where Changó was adored with chicken blood? ... met the
santita
and begun to worship her a little? Dolores would never tell. She didn’t like to talk about chicken blood.

“Any messages?” he asked, forgetting that he wasn’t on Oliver Street with Loretta Howard.

“One message.” And she handed Holden a little pewter animal with its head on backward.

“Where did you get this?”

“From a blonde,” the
madrina
said. “She was looking for you. Said she was your sweetheart. But I couldn’t take the chance.”

“How did she find us?”

“Holden, we found her. She was wandering in one of our alleys. She had no business there. She could have been killed. Is she your sweetheart?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Did you tell her I was all right?”

“I said nothing. I couldn’t give our position away. It was damaging enough that I accepted this little toy from her. She was an unfortunate woman, speaking so loud, calling you Sidney.”

“Is she safe?”

“I don’t care. She could have been a decoy.”