Scarface (10 page)

That’s what it looked like out in the glitter dome, anyway. Back in the kitchen things were a little different. In the scullery corner, where Tony Montana scrubbed the grease off a million pots and Manolo loaded the cavernous dishwashers, life was still lived at $3.50 an hour. They’d been out of Fort Chaffee for four weeks now, and they used up the cash they got paid for the hit just getting to Miami. They were bunked with two others in the extra room of a cruddy apartment behind an outdoor market where chickens were sold. It smelled like the slum alleys of Havana. The job at the Havanito Restaurante was the best they could get. All the refugees they talked to told them to shut up and be grateful.

“All I can say is,” Tony shouted over the noise of the running water, “your big shot friend better come up with somethin’ quick, or I’m gonna rob me a bank. I didn’t come to this country to break my achin’ back.”

“He’s comin’, he’s comin’,” Manolo shot back. “Trust me, will ya?”

When the mountain of pots was finished, they were both drenched in their long white aprons, as if they’d been caught in a storm at sea. They lit cigarettes and took a break in the linen closet, peering out through a cubbyhole into the main dining room. At table after table they could see young Cuban guys in fancy clothes and lots of gold, chiquitas curled beside them on the fat banquettes, their bodyguards just across from them, missing nothing as they watched the room.

“Look at that chick, man,” Manolo whispered, nodding at a booth not ten feet away. “Look at them knockers.”

“Yeah, look at the goon she’s with,” retorted Tony sullenly. “What’s he got that we don’t got?”

“Money, chico. Lots and lots o’ money. Coke money.”

“Junkies,” sneered Tony. “They got no fuckin’ character.”

He reached to stub his cigarette in the ashtray propped on Manolo’s knee. In the dim light of the closet, Tony saw his hand all shriveled white from the dishwater. A curious mix of associations flashed across his brain. He recalled his grandfather, grabbing Tony’s wrists and staring into his palms as if the old man was a fortuneteller. “You got good hands, boy,” he said. “Someday they’ll be picking gold right off the street.” He thought of Bogart, mosquito-bitten and backed to the wall, all the gold slipping through his fingers like water. He saw his own hand gripped around the stiletto, cutting the world to bits so it would look at him and quake.

The door to the closet swung open, and Jimmy Lee, the Rastafarian salad chef, stuck his nose in. “What you boys smokin’ in here?” he asked, his tongue licking at the corners of his mouth. His hair was in dreadlocks, and he had to wear it piled up under a net. He looked like Aunt Jemima.

“We’re just tootin’ a little Co’Cola,” Manolo said.

“You wish, honey,” Jimmy Lee answered dryly. “You got company out back. Looks like he died six months ago.”

Manolo gripped Tony’s arm: “El Mono’s here!”

Tony gave a small groan, as if he couldn’t take anyone seriously who sported a moniker. He walked through the kitchen behind Manolo, affecting a certain indifference. When they stepped out into the alley, Manolo went right over to where two men stood leaning against a burgundy Coupe de Ville. Tony hung back to check it all out. El Mono, “the Monkey,” lived up to his name. He was nervous and crooked and feverish, seeming to smoke about three cigarettes at once. His face was pocked and pitted like the moon. The other man, Martin Rojas, was an amiable, heavy-set man with a receding hairline. He looked like an off-duty cop.

“Hey Omar,” Manolo said, using the Monkey’s real name as he shook his little paw, “how’s it goin’? This is my friend I told you about—Tony Montana. He cut up Rebenga good. Hey Martin, meet Tony.”

The two men looked Tony up and down. Tony nodded curtly and stepped forward. Somehow he made it seem as if he had stepped away. Omar said: “You can handle a machine gun?”

“Sure,” said Manolo. “We was both in the army. Tony, he fought in Africa.”

Omar’s eyes flicked from Tony to Manolo: “Be at Hector’s
bodega
Thursday. Four o’clock. We’ll pick you up. You get five hundred each.”

“Hey!” cried Manolo, like it was a gift. “What do we gotta do?”

“We gotta do a boat, that’s what we gotta do.” Omar’s voice was completely neutral. He revealed exactly nothing.

“Okay, let’s do it,” said Manolo, smiling and nodding gratefully.

Suddenly Tony’s voice broke in: “We heard the going rate on a boat’s a thousand a night.”

Omar grinned. “Yeah, well first you gotta work your way up to five hundred.” He dropped his cigarette butt in the dirt and ground it out with his ratty tennis shoe. He began to walk around the car to the driver’s side. Tony took another step forward. Martin’s body seemed to tense, as if he stood ready to crouch and fight. Tony said: “What’d I do for you guys in the slammer, huh? Was that dominoes or what?”

Omar grinned a little wider, as if some private joke got better and better. His grin was the most simian thing about him. He looked like he’d just eaten a banana. He turned to Manolo. “What’s it with your friend, chico?” he asked pleasantly. “Don’t he think we couldna got some other space cadet to do that hit? Cheaper maybe?”

Tony shot back: “Then why didn’t you?”

Manolo said: “Hey, it’s okay, Omar. He’ll do it.”

Omar opened the door of the car. Martin got in on the passenger’s side. Omar continued to address Manolo. It was as if Tony wasn’t even there. “Just be happy you’re getting the favor this time, chico,” said the Monkey, nervously jingling the keys in his hand. “And tell your friend not to give us no trouble, or he’ll get his head stuck up his ass.”

He slipped into the car. He was so hunched over his head barely came above the steering wheel. The Cadillac came to life with a roar, and they screeched off up the alley, Manolo raising his hand to give them a last wave. Tony turned on his heel and strode back into the kitchen. Twenty more pots had been stacked in the old steel sink. Tony slipped the damp apron over his head and began to scrub savagely. Those pots were going to shine like silver before he was through.

The convoy headed down the empty highway. They’d just crossed over the bridge to Bahia Honda Key. It was two
A.M.
Tony Montana drove the lead sedan, with two other cars tight behind him. Martin Rojas sat in the passenger seat, muttering into a Gabriel walkie-talkie, radius thirty miles, forty on the open sea. Several voices crackled through the static. “Okay twelve, keep coming,” said one. “All clear, tango sierra.” Martin let out a string of numbers in Spanish. A second voice spoke through the darkness: “We love ya, twelve. No mosquitoes here.”

At an order from Martin, Tony turned off into a mangrove swamp. The road was rutted and full of puddles. Hundreds of crabs were scrambling across it. The tires of the convoy crushed them into the mud; nobody even felt them. They twisted through bushes that scraped the sides of the car, over roots and shell pits that jarred their teeth, till they veered toward a light and burst through into a clearing. A heavyweight North American moving van stood foursquare in the brush above the beach. Twenty men carrying machine guns stood guard all around it. It couldn’t have driven in through the swamp. There had to be a real road on the other side of the clearing. It occurred to Tony that his own convoy had been brought in roundabout, so they wouldn’t be able to find the place again.

At the water’s edge, a fleet of perhaps a dozen racing boats was being revved. Omar sat in an open Jeep on the beach, supervising the operation. He had a radio operator working shortwave beside him. All the guards around the van, all the men in the boats were dressed in olive fatigues. To Tony, it had the look of a paramilitary encampment, just prior to debarkation. On Martin’s orders, he drew up the sedan beside the Jeep. The two other cars parked just behind him. He was told to grab his weapon and get out and wait.

His gun was the prettiest thing Tony had ever packed. It was an Ingram Model-10 machine pistol, with folding butt, capable of firing eleven hundred rounds a minute. Ten inches long. Came with a nice suppressor. You could slip it in a briefcase easy, a purse even. Tony and Manolo had each been issued an Ingram just before the convoy took off from Miami. They would have to turn them in when the operation was done. But right now, as Tony stood by the car and hefted the thing, he felt as if he was holding the future in the palm of his hand. It felt terrific.

He exchanged a glance with Manolo, who stood by the car behind him. They were clearly very impressed by the scope of the operation. They listened as the radio operator worked the shortwave. “Intersection twelve September and fifteen October,” said a voice off the dark ocean, “we’re twenty-one karats west of you.” The operator leaned into his mike. “Check twelve,” he said. “We got a bullfrog croaking around at thirteen October.”

Tony turned to check out the moving van and was startled to see two cops in uniform walking towards the Jeep. Omar turned from his charts to greet them. They all shook hands. “So what’s happening, Omar?” asked the fat one.

“Everything’s cool, Charlie,” replied the Monkey. “Got a big Jamaica wind tonight. I figure we need about six, seven hours.”

The fat cop whistled. “Frank’s gettin’ up in the big league, ain’t he? Whatcha doin’ weight-wise?”

“Twenty-three, twenty-four tons,” said Omar.

“Okay, Omar,” the second cop said. “No problem this end. We got you covered all night.”

Omar reached into the back seat of the Jeep and grabbed up two paper sacks. He handed one to each of the cops. The fat one opened his, glanced inside, then stuffed it into an airline bag he carried in one hand. The second cop turned his over to the first, as if the fat one was the banker. They glanced around approvingly and made off again in the direction of the van. Tony pretended to be looking somewhere else.

The boats went out in ranks of four, like a show at Cypress Gardens. Magnums, Scorpions, Performers, Novas—Omar’s men had no special preference when it came to boats, not like they had for guns. They swept out into the Caribbean, steady at sixty for about ten minutes. Tony was in the first rank, sitting in a white vinyl bucket seat beside Martin. The driver was a blond kid, looked like a surfer. At a signal Tony did not pick up, the four boats cut their engines and came to a halt. Martin opened a briefcase fitted with an electronic system. He unwound a long antenna cable and dropped it in the water. A numbering system began to flash red on the monitor. The driver was standing up now and studying the ocean through a nightscope. Martin listened through headphones and studied the monitor as Tony dragged the antenna through the water, circling the boat. Suddenly a beep went up from the briefcase.

“There,” said Martin, and flicked on a microphone. He read out a group of coordinates to the fleet of boats around him.

They started west-southwest at quarter speed, and after about five minutes they saw the freighter looming under the moon. She was a hundred and ninety feet, a Panamanian V-8 built in the forties. She looked like an ocean liner next to the racing boats that soon were buzzing like hornets about her bows. Tony’s boat was a typical hauler: twenty-eight feet, with twin 450 Chryslers. Stripped of galleys and bunks, it could haul up to five thousand pounds of weed.

Dozens of sweating men on the freighter’s deck began off-loading the bales into the racers. They worked by the light of flashlamps, moving the bulky burlap out of the holds, along the decks, and onto the pulleys that fed down to the haulers. Tony, looking up at the sailors who worked the pulleys, saw black Jamaican faces. Most of the sailors were stripped to the waist and wearing bandannas. Once Tony thought he saw the captain: an enormous man, about six-foot-six, wearing a red motorcycle helmet.

The loading took two and a half hours. Then the racing fleet took off for Bahia Honda, each boat stacked to the gills with bales of weed. When they reached the clearing in the mangrove swamp, a human chain of workers started heaving the bales from the boats up into the van. Tony and Manolo and three other guards stood by and kept watch. As each boat was unloaded, Tony noticed that the crew hauled it up the beach, where somebody with a big tin can would stand on the tilted deck and douse it with liquid. Tony couldn’t figure out what was happening, till the smell of gasoline was wafted toward him in the offshore breeze. He couldn’t believe it. They were going to
burn
these boats? What for?

It was dawn before the van was completely loaded. The boats were all clustered high in the sand at one end of the beach. As Tony and Martin moved to the sedan, the two cops lit a torch and set the boats on fire. The first explosion was enormous, lighting up the clearing like the sun that had not yet risen. Tony had been very good all night; he hadn’t asked a single question. But his frown was so anxious as he watched the boats explode in flame, easily a half million dollars in hardware, that Martin volunteered a curt explanation:

“They’re stolen. We can’t take ’em back. Too easy to trace.”

Tony nodded. The van pulled out of the clearing and headed for the highway. Tony’s convoy cut back through the swamp the way they came. For several hundred yards, Tony could still see the flames in the rearview mirror. The waste was so astonishing, he couldn’t even fathom it. He thought of the high-roll gamblers his grandfather used to tell him about, who blew a hundred grand in a single night at the blackjack table. He cradled the Ingram in his lap, sorry he had not had a chance to fire it. He thought of the men at the top, so rich they could burn it, and he raged inside with a wild impatience.

He wanted it now. He wasn’t going to wait any longer, and he wasn’t going to start at the bottom either. As he turned onto the highway and began the long drive back to Miami, he realized he’d have to mount an operation of his own. Whatever it took. Whoever he had to step on. At last he’d reached the place where the streets were littered with gold. He’d seen it now. All he had to do was scoop it up.

Two days later Tony and Manolo were walking down Ocean Avenue, all duded up. Manolo had dragged Tony along when he went to blow his five hundred, and he’d even convinced Tony to toss out his fatigues and spring for a decent suit of clothes. Just now they were dressed in peacock shirts and tight-fitting pants, and they walked past windows reeking with prices, pointing at all they wanted.