Scarface (22 page)

There was a sound of running behind them. The Shadow had bolted out of the chopper as soon as it touched down. Now he tore across the lawn, as if he knew his boss was in grave trouble. He was ready to break every bone in Tony Montana’s body. Sosa and Tony faced each other grimly. In a moment Tony would have to turn and fight the Shadow. He was a bare ten feet away when Sosa held up a hand and stopped him in his tracks.

“It’s all right, Alberto. Leave us.”

Obediently the bodyguard turned and trotted back the way he came. Sosa stepped over the litter of broken china and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“I think you speak from the heart, Tony. But I say to myself: What about this Lopez? He has
chivatos
like that working for him, his judgment must stink. I say to myself: What other mistakes has this Lopez made? How can I trust this organization? You tell me, Tony.”

“Hey, Frank’s real smart,” said Tony. “Don’t blame him for that animal. It could happen to anyone—even you. I’ll talk to Frank myself. I’ll fix it up between you. We gotta make this deal.”

Sosa smiled. He motioned to Tony to sit down and passed him the bowl of fruit. Out on the lawn they could see three of Sosa’s paramilitary guards carrying away the remains of Omar, the man they called the Monkey. Hummingbirds buzzed the jasmine plants that bowered over the portico.

“As far as Panama, then,” said Sosa. “Thirteen grand a key.”

“Ten,” said Tony.

“Twelve.”

“Eleven.”

Sosa smiled and drained his coffee. He set the cup and saucer down on the table. He reached out with both hands, as if to show he had nothing up his sleeves. Tony reached out his own hands, crossing them so he could grip Sosa in a double handshake. They sat hunched forward in their wicker chairs, holding the grip for a long moment.

“Eleven, then,” said Sosa. “I think we’re going to be doing business together for a long time, Tony.”

“That’s the way I want it, Noldo.”

They let each other go and leaned back in their chairs. Their eyes stayed locked together. When Sosa spoke again, it was with the oddest tenderness. “Just remember, Tony,” he said, “don’t fuck me. Whatever you do, don’t ever fuck me.”

At the end of the lawn, the guards tossed Omar’s body over the edge and down the canyon. Already the scavenger birds were gathering, wheeling in the sky.

The Lopez Bakery was a model operation. Housed in a white-tiled deco building on Tallahassee Boulevard, it employed thirty-five Cuban refugees—the old school of refugees, who’d fled the mother country in the first days of the revolution, fine upstanding American citizens all. You could eat off the floor of the Lopez Bakery. Men in white aprons and bakers’ hats bustled back and forth with long wooden shovels, setting the dough in the wall ovens and bearing away the fragrant loaves. The Lopez Bakery specialized in delicious, crunchy soda crackers, of a kind that the Cuban community remembered fondly from the old days. But they made wonderful tarts as well, and wedding cakes and poppyseed rolls. It was a picture-book operation, with gleaming white trucks in the driveway and vigorous, grinning drivers to do the deliveries.

No wonder Frank Lopez had received so many citations. In his tidy office on the upper level, with a big picture window looking down on the bakery proper, the walls were chockablock with plaques and mementoes. The Chamber of Commerce, the Small Business Administration, the Better Business Bureau, the Elks, the Rotary, you name it—nothing they liked better than to take a tour of the bright and fragrant premises of the Lopez Bakery. It was the classic American success story, immigration division. Along one wall, between a Cuban patriot flag and the stars and stripes, was a row of photographs: Frank shaking hands with JFK; Frank shaking hands with LBJ; Frank shaking hands with Nixon; Frank shaking hands with Jimmy Carter.

No one was shaking Frank’s hand just now. He stormed around the office, hollering and shaking his fist in the air. His bodyguard Ernie stood impassively in the corner. Tony and Manolo sat in two chairs drawn up to the desk. Manolo was kind of hunkered down, wincing a bit in the face of Frank’s explosion. Tony sat with his arms folded, a patient look on his face.

“What are you,
nuts,
Montana!” roared Frank, banging his fist against the wall. “You go and make an eighteen-million-dollar deal without even
checking
with me! I’ve had people tortured for less than that!”

“Hey, Frank, it’s a money machine,” said Tony. “Eleven grand a key, we can’t lose. We make seventy-five million in a year. That’s serious money, Frank.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s Sosa gonna do when I don’t come up with the first five million, huh? Send me a bill? I’ll tell you what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna send hit squads up here, that’s what.”

He groaned like a man in pain and banged the wall again. All the photographs jumped, and the one of Nixon went cockeyed. Ernie flexed his fingers, as if waiting for an order to strangle someone. He didn’t care who.

Tony shook his head and sighed, like he was terribly disappointed. “Frank, you don’t realize. I’m in real tight with Sosa.”

“You know what this trial is costing me in legal fees, Montana? A fuckin’ fortune, that’s what. Now they got this new racketeering law says they can take it all, every penny I ever made, back to the year one!” Frank swept a bunch of papers off his desk and onto the floor. The unfairness of things was insupportable.

“So you’re short a couple mill,” said Tony. “So I’ll make some moves on the street for you. We can get a mill here, mill there. Everyone’s gonna want a piece o’ this. Kinda like a syndication, ya know.”

Frank shot him a cold-blooded look. “You been makin’ some moves on your own, have you?”

Tony shrugged. “Hey, I keep my eyes open.”

“Oh yeah? What do your eyes say about the Diaz Brothers, what about them, huh? What about Gaspar Gomez? What’s he gonna do when you start moving two thousand keys on the street next year?”

“Fuck Gaspar Gomez. Fuck the Diaz Brothers.” Tony was surly now and impatient. He stood up and faced Frank across the desk, and perhaps for the first time both of them realized Tony was a couple of inches taller. “What’d they ever do for us? We’ll bury them cockroaches.”

Frank just stared at him for a minute. He was breathing heavily from all that rage, and there was confusion in his eyes. He’d been in this business for fifteen years, and he knew the young man in front of him was the wave of the future. He didn’t want to be scared. He wanted to go with the crazy risks and maybe end up with the world in his pocket. The anger began to fade in him, and he sat heavily in the desk chair.

Tony sat casually on the corner of the desk. “Look, Frank,” he said, “it’s time. We gotta expand. The whole operation.” His voice was gentle and coaxing. “New York—L.A.—Chicago. We have to set a mark of our own, Frank, and enforce it, whatever it takes. We gotta think big.”

“Like your friend Sosa, huh?” Frank sounded weary. “Maybe this is his idea. He’s a greaseball, Tony. He’s a snake, that’s what he is.” But somehow there wasn’t much conviction in his curses. It was as if he didn’t expect to be believed. He was like a father whom nobody listened to any more, whose sons were too busy getting laid. “You don’t trust a guy like that,” said Frank. “Maybe I made a mistake sending you down there. Is that what happened to Omar, Tony? Did he know something he wasn’t supposed to know?”

“Are you saying I’m lying, Frank?”

Ernie moved a step out of the corner. Manny’s hand slipped off the chair arm and hovered at his jacket pocket.

Frank spoke carefully. “Let’s just say I want things to stay the way they are. For now, Tony. Stall the deal.” There was a long pause. As the two men stared in each other’s eyes, Tony knew Frank knew Tony had given his word to Sosa. There was a break about to happen here. Maybe it wasn’t irretrievable, maybe they just had to sleep on it. Maybe they still respected each other enough.

All Tony said was: “Have it your way . . . boss.”

He turned to leave, beckoning Manolo to follow. It seemed there would be no final word. They reached the door, Tony opened it, then stood back to let Manolo go through. Frank called out on the spur of the moment. He almost sounded sad, except the words were so hard.

“You know I told you when you started Tony, the guys who last in this business are the guys who fly straight. Real low key. Real quiet. The guys who want it all—the chicks, the champagne, the flash—they don’t last.”

Tony paused to hear it all, but he didn’t look over at Frank. And he didn’t nod at the end or wait a respectable interval. He just walked out and shut the door. If he seemed angry at anyone at all, it was Manolo, who stood in the outer office looking bewildered and frightened. Tony batted him on the side of the head and headed for the elevator. He banged the button and banged the wall beside it, and Manolo tried to steer clear of his fury, which only made Tony snarl at him. They went down in silence.

The doors opened, and they walked through the bustling bakery, skirting a cartload of rolls as it dollied out to the trucks. It wasn’t till they’d gained the street that Manolo could speak. He didn’t care how angry Tony got. He still couldn’t understand why everything fell apart up there.

“What’s he gonna do, Tony?”

Tony spun around as if he was going to jump his friend. His eyes were slits of rage. “You mean what are
we
gonna do, chico,” he said with a sneer. “We’re gonna get Frank Lopez, that’s what.”

Chapter Six

E
IGHT DAYS LATER Tony and Manolo were sitting in a plush waiting room. Everything was either gray or lavender, and even the walls seemed to be carpeted. Both men were decked out in suits and ties. Manolo carried the attaché case on his lap, perched on his knees as if he was expecting dinner on a plane. Tony read the sports page, grumbling because there wasn’t enough soccer coverage.

They were waiting to see George Sheffield, a tough and grizzled lawyer whose reputation was nearly legend among the coke kings, several of whom he had managed to keep out of jail, in spite of crimes too numerous to list. He was on retainer to five or six Cuban gangsters. His methods were entirely unorthodox and certainly illegal, but he had so many murderous friends, nobody dared to question his arrangements. Besides, so many lawmen were on the take to him, there was scarcely anyone left to ask the questions.

Tony’s appointment was for three
P.M.
, and he didn’t get ushered in till after four, but he kept his temper. He understood there were men that even kings had to go to hat in hand. He had pulled a lot of connections just to get this meeting. He had meanwhile taken his cut of the last Colombia shipment in coke. Frank was more than glad to lay a couple of kilos on him, because his own distribution was thrown into chaos by Omar’s sudden demise. Tony and Manolo had spent the whole last week dealing the coke with Nick the Pig.

They’d had to be very careful not to intrude on Frank’s client list. Moreover, they still had to keep their commitments to Frank, so it meant that some days they were out on the street twenty or thirty hours without a break, peddling grams. They had to get coked up just to keep going. For the first time since they started in the business, they began to look a bit green about the gills. Despite the three-piece suits and the attachés, no one would have mistaken them now for anything else but dealers.

A blonde and shapely secretary who was clearly getting it from the boss led them into Sheffield’s office. The lawyer didn’t even look up from his papers at first, as he spoke into the phone with a hoarse and gravelly croak. His eyes were heavy-lidded and yellow; they seemed cigarette-stained like his fingers. As Tony and Manolo sat down he put out his fortieth Camel of the day, swore into the phone, and hung up abruptly. He ran a hand through his thin red hair and looked warily at the two Cubans.

“So who’s Tony Montana?”

“That’s me,” said Tony. “This is my partner, Manolo Ray.” No response. “They tell me you’re the best lawyer in town.”

Sheffield snorted and reached for a Camel. “Did they also tell you how expensive I am?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s like they say—if you gotta ask, you’re outa your league.”

“J.P. Morgan,” Sheffield said. “A personal hero of mine. So you read American history, do you? What’ve you done lately to
get your
name in it?”

Tony laughed. “Not much yet. But I’m thinkin’ of expanding my operation, see. Go independent. Get my own distribution system. Make my deals right at the source. From what I understand, the first thing I need is a class act like you on the payroll. You know, to advise me—just like you do those other guys.”

“What’s your time-frame?”

“Now,” said Tony.

Sheffield took a deep puff of his cigarette. Then he coughed till it seemed he would spew his guts out. He hawked noisily into his handkerchief. Then he spoke, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “We start with a hundred grand,” he said. “Cash. On the table.” His rheumy eyes took on an arrogant glaze, as if to say: “Come back when you’re ready to play hardball.”

Tony nodded at Manolo, who flicked open his briefcase and drew out an envelope. He handed this over to Tony. Tony reached in and grabbed four wrapped stacks of thousand-dollar bills. There were twenty-five bills to the stack. Tony butterflied and fanned the money, as if to make a ritual show of its all being there, and he laid it in a pile on Sheffield’s blotter. When Tony looked up, Sheffield was smiling broadly.