Scarface (23 page)

“I guess I got the job,” said the lawyer.

Tony waited in the Jaguar. He’d made no attempt to conceal the car. It was visible from all twenty-six floors of the condo complex across the street. A limousine was waiting under the portico. After Tony had been sitting there about ten minutes, he saw three men emerge from the condo building: Frank Lopez, Ernie, his bodyguard, and a third man Tony had never seen before, a burly man with a slight limp. They all climbed into the limo, and it drove away, passing so close to Tony that Frank could have reached out the window and touched him. But Frank was too busy talking to the third man. And Ernie, who was paid to watch for people like Tony, was already deep in the funny papers.

Tony left his car and walked across to the entrance. The day guard by the elevator knew him of course and merely nodded as Tony stepped in and pressed 26. When he reached the floor, the guard with the dog nodded like a buck private in the presence of an officer. He almost saluted. Tony walked up to Frank’s door and rang. He expected a servant, at least the maid, and he was momentarily startled when Elvira herself opened the door.

“You just missed Frank,” she said flatly. The flatness did not conceal her surprise. She wore jeans and was barefoot. Her body was beautiful, her face tired.

“I didn’t come to see Frank.”

Her eyes flared with annoyance. “This is not the time or the place,” she said, already closing the door. “Next time make an appointment.”

He stuck his foot in the door and blocked it and bulled his way into the foyer. She didn’t put up any fight. She covered her face with her hands and groaned with exasperation, sick of this game. “I got something important to tell you,” Tony said gently. “Why don’t you make some drinks and act normal.”

“Sure,” she said, turning wearily toward the living room. “Why not? We’re all normal here.”

She walked across to the bar, reached down two glasses, and poured two fingers of Chivas Regal in each. She opened the small refrigerator beneath the bar to get ice, then seemed to decide it was too much trouble, and banged the door shut with her bare foot. She turned to hand him his drink.

“So tell me, how’s crime?”

“I heard you was up in New York,” said Tony. “All by yourself.”

“It’s none of your business who I was with.”

“Me, I been down to Bolivia.”

“So I understand,” she said, seeming to get more hostile with every remark. She made no move to sit down but leaned against the bar in a defiant pose.

“What else do you understand?”

“I understand you and Frank have done your last deal together.”

“I guess so,” said Tony. “We ain’t formally concluded anything, but . . .” He shrugged and shot her a sly grin. “Makes things a whole lot easier, don’t it?”

“Does it?”

He raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to the land of opportunity,” he said. She clinked glasses with him, and each took a belt of the scotch. She did not return his grin. She seemed to be waiting for him to make his point or leave, she didn’t care which. Out of the blue he said: “Do you like kids?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Good. Cause I like kids.” Suddenly he got very awkward. He moved a step closer to her, but then she seemed to freeze a bit, so he moved a step away. The grin was gone. His voice was husky as he spoke. “Look, here’s what I am,” he said. “I climbed up out of the gutter. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I got guts and I know the streets and I’m makin’ the right connections. All I need now’s the right woman. Then there’s no stopping me. I’ll go all the way to the top—really
be
somebody. Like Frank y’know, with the charities and committees and stuff, but even bigger.” He laughed awkwardly. “Tony Montana, huh? Immigrant refugee makes good. That’s me.”

Elvira looked vaguely stunned, but she said nothing. Perhaps there was pathos in her eyes. Mostly she looked convinced he had just arrived from the moon.

“Anyway,” Tony went on, “what I came up here to tell you is . . . uh . . . I’m in love with you.” They both looked away from each other. There was something almost apologetic in Tony’s voice. He seemed to understand it would be so much simpler if love had not come into it at all. “I know things right away,” he said. “The first time I seen you, I knew you belonged to me. It’s like we’re two tigers, y’know. And there’s no other tigers left.” They looked at each other again. Her face was very, very quiet. It was hard to tell if she was angry or sad or what, but she wasn’t happy. He said: “I want you to marry me. I want you to be the mother of my children.”

For a moment they stood in a stunned silence. Then she shook her head with a mournful little laugh and moved to the end of the bar. “Tony, Tony,” she said, softly reprimanding him as she opened a drawer and pulled out a mirror about six inches square. “I already told you. I don’t believe in marriage.”

“But this is different.”

She set the mirror down on the bar, then fetched a vial of cocaine from the drawer. She unscrewed the cap and began to tap out lines on the mirror’s surface. “It’s never different,” she said wearily. “And what about Frank? What are you going to do about Frank?”

“Frank’s not gonna last,” he said, a trace of pity in his voice. “You know that.”

She had four lines laid down, each about two inches long. She set the vial down and retrieved a short glass straw from the drawer. She leaned down and tooted one nostril, then stood up with her eyes shut, holding the bridge of her nose.

“I’m not lookin’ for an answer now,” he said. “Just think about it, will you? You and me, we could . . .” His hands fluttered in a futile gesture. He couldn’t find the words.

She leaned down to do the other nostril but suddenly had to sneeze. She tried to hold it in, pinching her nose as she let out a little squeak. And now there was blood in her hand, and she threw her head back as she reached for a Kleenex. Tony stepped toward her, reaching out both hands as if she was going to fall.

“Please,” she said, daubing her nose with the tissue, “just go now, will you?”

He nodded gravely. Whatever she liked. “I’ll be back,” he said, and turned and strode away to the door. As he closed it behind him he began to whistle softly. All the way out to the car, all the way back to his place he was in a drunken good mood.

After all, she hadn’t said no.

He went out again at four o’clock, and this time he took unusual precautions not to be followed. He drove around the block three times, idling under a tree till the street behind him was empty of traffic. In a way it wasn’t odd that he should be so secretive. After all, he had appointments with dangerous men all day long; and he often returned with fifteen or twenty thousand in cash on the seat beside him. But even this did not explain the curious shyness in his face. He almost looked embarrassed, the way another man might look as he snuck out to buy a dirty magazine.

He drove down 17th Avenue to Shenandoah Park. He pulled into the driveway of a three-story tenement, where a bunch of Cuban teenagers were tinkering at a ’58 Chevy. They watched in awe as Tony parked the Jag. He waved to them as he trotted up the steps to the back door. Then he disappeared inside and climbed two flights to the top floor. There was a noise of laughter and an accordion playing behind the door at the top of the stairs. Tony knocked.

The door opened, and a burly man threw up his hands and hooted with delight when he saw who it was. He shouted back over his shoulder: “Hey, it’s Tony!”

He beckoned Tony into a large and crowded kitchen, where a group of eight or ten children was seated around the table, sporting party hats and eating hot dogs. They cheered when they saw Tony, and Tony laughed and shook his fists in the air like a boxer. An enormous Spanish woman stood at the stove, and another man perched on a stool, playing the accordion. Tony waved at all of them, then crouched to the table beside one of the kids. “So tell me,” he whispered, “how old are you? ’Bout nineteen, huh?”

“No! Ten!” cried Paco Colon, throwing up ten fingers for emphasis.

“No kiddin’,” said Tony. “You coulda fooled me.” He drew a thick envelope out of his pocket. “You think you can use these?”

Paco Colon, the boy that Tony had plucked from the sea, who had drifted all night in his arms, asleep in a raging storm, now tore open his birthday present. Inside the envelope were tickets to a half dozen Dolphin games, tickets for the whole Colon brood that sat around the table. Paco waved the tickets in his hand, shouting excitedly. Then all the children cheered.

Waldo Colon set down the accordion and went to the refrigerator to get Tony a beer. Waldo and his wife Dolores had taken in all his sister’s kids, for she had been one of the missing off the trawler. They were a dozen now, uncles and cousins and the aged grandmother, all living somewhat helter-skelter in the third floor tenement overlooking Shenandoah Park. Tony had tracked them down about a month ago, remembering the promise Waldo Colon had made to him when he retrieved his nephew at Key West Naval.

Anything Tony ever needed. Anything.

Tony chatted amiably with Waldo and Dolores, sipping his beer and pleading he was too full to eat. They asked him about his business, and he replied evasively, for as far as they knew he made all his money in import-export. They tried to fix him up with a date, listing all the eligible girls they knew around the neighborhood. He declined, laughing heartily at their insistence that he needed a woman to fatten him up.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the parlor. A tremendous roar and a stamping of feet. All the children squealed and held their breath. Then a gorilla appeared in the doorway, beating its breast like King Kong. The children shrieked with excitement as the gorilla lumbered around the table to Paco’s place. He picked the child up bodily out of his chair and held him over his head, roaring triumphantly. Paco was giddy with laughter. The gorilla lowered the child onto his shoulders and pranced around the kitchen as the other children cheered.

Finally Paco gripped the gorilla’s neck and yanked. The headpiece came off. The kids whistled and banged the table when they saw who it was: the toothless retard, the one who had thrown the inner tube to Tony and Paco. Now that the jig was up, he lowered Paco to the floor, unzipped the stuffy suit, and stepped out and bowed. As the children applauded, he walked over to Tony and spoke a laborious hello. Though he had a severely cleft palate, he talked with greater precision now, for the Colons had enrolled him in special classes at a rehabilitation center.

“Hello, Ricardo,” Tony said warmly, shaking the young man’s hand.

Tracking this one down had been a good deal more difficult. Tony had had to bribe an official at INS, and even then it took two weeks of poring over medical charts, for he didn’t even have a name to go on. Eventually he found him in a public sanitarium in Sweetwater, thin and terrified and strapped to a bed, covered with sores. Three more bribes were required to spring him. And most important, Tony had had to convince Waldo Colon to take in another child, this one twenty years old.

Waldo and Dolores had not even had to discuss it. They nodded yes before Tony finished asking the question.

Now Tony visited once every couple of weeks, usually unannounced. But today was special, Paco’s birthday.

They all grouped around the table as Dolores bore in the cake, decorated yellow and blazing with candles. They all sang at the top of their voices, Tony included. He could only stay another few minutes, for he had another delivery to make before sundown. He would press an envelope of cash into the hand of the protesting Waldo on his way out, as he always did. Meanwhile he laughed and sang with the others, all his problems forgotten.

As soon as they finished their cake, he would give the kids a boxing lesson.

The Babylon Club was hopping like Saturday night as Tony and Manolo drove up. Tony turned the Jaguar over to the carhop he used to play cards with in jail, palming him twenty bucks as he shook the guy’s hand. Tony and Manolo, both in tuxedos, made their way through the crowd on the steps and entered the glittering foyer. The Babylon was always jammed, always fast and wild, but some nights it seemed to go over the edge, till the air itself crackled with something like an electric charge. It had to do with a conjunction of the music, the drugs, the carnal desires, and maybe even the moon. Whatever it was, it was turned up high tonight.

As soon as he saw them, the maitre d’ hurried over and shook both their hands. He led them through the milling crowd at the bar and into the restaurant. Tony nodded to several people as he made his way to the perfect table just above the dance floor. He ordered a vodka tonic. Manolo had scarcely sat down when he started looking around for a woman. Tony was too busy thinking. He had a hundred details to sort out about sending a team of mules out of Panama. Seeing Elvira this afternoon had made him glad, but also terribly impatient. As he waited for his drink he pulled apart a book of matches, idly watching Manolo as the latter scanned the crowd on the dance floor.

Suddenly Manolo’s mouth dropped open. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Tony’s eyes swiveled to the dance floor. Like a laser he spotted his sister Gina, in a black crepe dress he’d sent her himself. She was dancing with a flashy young Cuban in a burgundy velvet suit, big diamonds on both of his pinkies. Instinctively Tony rose in his chair, his hands curling into fists.

“Easy, Tony,” said Manolo, “it’s okay, it’s just a disco for Chrissake.”

“Who’s she with?”

“What do you give her money for, if you don’t want her to go out and have fun?”

“Who is he?” asked Tony again, but beginning to calm down now. The waiter arrived with the drinks, and he sat.

“Some kid, he works for Luco.”

Just then Gina turned in their direction. Her eyes widened when she spotted them, but she quickly waved and grinned at them. Manolo waved back. Tony nodded. The guy in the burgundy checked them out.

“Keep an eye on her, will ya?” Tony grabbed his drink and stood up. It was time to work the room, see who he needed to make an arrangement with. He was damned if he was going to sit and watch like a chaperone. “Make sure he don’t dance too close,” he called over his shoulder to Manolo.