Scarface (26 page)

It was getting on close to four-thirty when they pulled up across the street from the Lopez Bakery. Manolo was already there, standing beside the Cadillac and nervously looking left and right as he puffed on a cigarette. When Tony got out of the Jaguar he tried once again to apologize, but Tony silenced him with a playful cuff on the side of the head. They left Martin outside to cover the street. Tony had guessed right that there would be no extra guards at the bakery, since the war had been meant to be fought and won and finished with at the Babylon. Tony and Manolo and Chi-Chi went around to the back of the building, where the bakery trucks were all lined up. A couple of people had already reported for work to start the ovens, but they were busy inside. The three men moved up the outdoor fire escape and jimmied the door at the top.

As they made their way down the dim corridor, they could see the light spilling out from the half-open door of Frank’s office. As they edged closer, guns drawn and at the ready, they could hear Frank bellowing into the phone.

“What?! You gotta be kiddin’, aren’t ya? It was three to one. Junkie dopes!” He slammed down the phone and turned to someone in the office. “They screwed it up. Don’t anything get done right any more?”

A muffled voice said something like: “There’s always another day. At least you scared the shit out of him.”

“Did I tell ya ’bout my softball team?” asked Frank, as if the hit on Tony Montana was just another hassle he’d have to deal with later. “They won the division. We’re goin’ to Sarasota for the State Championship. How about that?”

“That’s great,” said the muffled voice.

Tony pushed the door open and stepped inside, leveling his gun at Ernie before the bodyguard could make a grab at his jacket. Manolo and Chi-Chi sidled in behind Tony. They stood on either side of him, their guns at ease, but the firepower was enough that Tony could lower his own gun to his side. Frank sat stunned at his desk. Across from him in an easy chair was Mel Bernstein, cradling a bourbon and water in one hand. Mel looked double-stunned.

“Congratulations, Frank,” said Tony. “What’d you do, pay off the umpire?”

Frank recovered beautifully. He frowned with concern at the cuts on Tony’s face, the arm in the sling. “Jesus, Tony, what happened?”

“Sorry I’m dressed so casual, Frank. They ruined one o’ my fifteen-hundred-dollar suits.”

“Who?” Frank demanded, clearly outraged. He sounded ready to track them down himself.

“Hitters,” said Tony flatly. “Never seen ’em before. Hiya Mel. What do you think?”

“I don’t think nothin’, Montana. I think you better develop some eyes in the back o’ your head.”

“Hey Tony,” said Frank, “I bet it was the Diaz Brothers.” He slammed his fist on the desk in fury. It was like he always said: the business was full of scum. “Sure it was. Who else, huh? They got a beef goes back to the Sun Ray job.”

“Maybe so,” said Tony. There wasn’t the shred of emotion in his voice.

Frank laughed nervously. Nothing was funny. “All that matters is you made it,” he said. “We’ll take care o’ those guys. I’ll see to it myself.”

Tony stepped forward and sat on the edge of Frank’s desk. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’m gonna take care of this myself.”

There was an awkward pause. Manolo and Chi-Chi stood as before, feet apart, their Ingrams cradled in their arms, in a paramilitary posture. Ernie’s eyes kept darting from one to the other of the intruders, as if he was looking for a chink in their armor. Mel sat back and sipped his drink. He was keeping a very low profile. What was happening here, he seemed to be saying, had nothing to do with him.

Frank spoke up in a halting voice: “Well . . . uh . . . so what are the guns for?”

“What for?” asked Tony. “I guess I must be paranoid, huh?” The air seemed to grow more tense. Suddenly the phone rang. Nobody made a move to answer. It rang again. “Why don’t you pick that up, Frank? Might be a deal.”

“It’s Elvira,” he said, the slightest note of warning in his voice. “She can’t get to sleep. Too much coke.”

It rang again. Tony reached for it. “I’ll tell her you’re not here,” he said.

Frank’s hand shot out and grabbed the phone before Tony could touch it. He lifted it to his ear, his lips quivering with anger because he couldn’t seem to control this scene. “Hello? Hi, darlin’.” As he listened he played with the papers on his desk, neatening them into piles. “Yeah, well, I should be home in about an hour. Why don’t you take a Quaalude, huh?” He opened a box of cigars and offered them up to Tony, as if they were having the most normal meeting imaginable. Tony shook his head. “Just sit tight till I get there, honey, okay? We’ll watch the sun come up. Okay? You take care now.” And he hung up the phone with a gentle smile, as if he’d proven something important to himself, if not to Tony Montana. He looked up at Tony now with perfect self-assurance. They could resolve whatever they had to, surely. Like a pair of gentlemen.

“Frank,” said Tony, “did anyone ever tell you you’re full o’ shit?”

“Huh?” Frank’s smile had not quite faded. Perhaps he hadn’t heard him right.

Tony reached forward and grabbed Frank by the collar of his shirt. He dragged him out of the desk chair and hauled him across the desk, sending the papers flying. “You know what I’m talkin’ about you worthless cockroach,” Tony said. Behind him Manolo raised his gun and pointed it at Ernie, who was quivering to move in on Tony. Mel sat perfectly still.

“Tony, no!” Frank was scared. He couldn’t work up any anger now, and a whine began to worm into his words. “You gotta listen, please.”

“You remember what a chazzer is, Frank? It’s a pig who don’t fly straight. Just like you.”

“Why would I hurt you Tony? I brought you in!” It was hard for Frank to talk, splayed as he was on his stomach, the heel of Tony’s hand pinning his neck to the desk. “I gave you your start, you’re my brother,” pleaded Frank. “I believed in you!”

Tony leaned down and spat the words in his face. “I stayed loyal to you, Frank. I made what I could on the side, but I never betrayed you.
Never.
But you . . .” Here he drew back and spat for real. “A man ain’t got no word, Frank, he’s a cockroach!” He squashed an imaginary cockroach under his thumb, right in front of Frank’s eyes. Then he pulled him further across the desk, till he was flailing.

“Mel! Mel!” cried Frank. “Do something, please!”

Mel sat as impassive as ever. “It’s your bed, Frank,” he said. “You lie in it.”

“Please Tony, gimme a second chance! Ten million—I’ll give you ten million bucks right now. I got it in a vault. In Spain. It’s yours, all of it. We’ll get on a plane.” He was squealing now like an animal, his voice broken by sobs. It seemed he was about to mess his pants.

“You know what your problem is, Frank? You don’t got any guts.” Tony lifted his hand from Frank’s neck, as if he couldn’t stand to touch such cowardly flesh.

Now Frank groveled. He clasped his hands and pleaded, his whole body quaking with terror. “You want Elvira, Tony? She’s yours, okay? I’ll go away, Tony, I’ll disappear. You’ll never hear from me again. Just gimme a chance, Tony, gimme a second chance. Please.”

Tony stared at him with disgust. All the men in the room seemed embarrassed by the spectacle. Even Ernie. Frank scrambled to his knees, sobbing freely now. He was like a specimen of something vile, set out on a laboratory table as a group of indifferent scientists stood around observing. Nobody else made a sound.

“I don’t wanna die, Tony, I never did nothing to nobody. Please . . . please.”

“Yeah you’re right, Frank,” Tony replied with a sneer of disdain, “you always had somebody else do it for you.” He turned to Manolo. “You mind shooting this cockroach for me?”

“Nah,” said Manolo, stepping past Tony to point-blank range.

“Tony, no!” cried Frank, as the first
whump
of the silencer sounded. The bullet caught him square in the chest; but even as he gripped his heart, trying to hold the blood in, he kept shaking his head in disbelief. Manolo fired a second time, then a third, and Frank keeled over backwards off the desk. The last look on his face was pure astonishment. The body crashed to the floor.

Tony swiveled his eyes to Mel Bernstein, who still remained calmly in his chair. “Don’t worry, Tony,” he said. “I didn’t see nothin’.”

“Oh yeah? What were
you
doin’ here, Mel? Sellin’ tickets to the policeman’s ball?”

“I told him it didn’t make sense, Tony. Why’s he wanna clip you when we coulda had you working for us instead?” Mel shook his head and grimaced with distaste. “But I guess he got hot, y’know, about the broad. He messed up real bad.”

“Yeah, so did you Bernstein,” Tony said coldly.

Bernstein shot a look at Tony’s eyes. Still he sat casually in the chair, still holding the drink in one hand. With Frank dead and the others standing around, he looked to be the senior officer of the group. But for the first time there was worry in his glance. “Careful, Tony,” he said. “Don’t go too far.”

“
I’m
not goin’ anywhere, Mel.
You
are.” He raised the gun.

Mel leaped to his feet, the blood draining from his face. He wasn’t a whiner like Frank. He wasn’t the sort who made deals. In a perfectly rational voice he said: “Hey c’mon, what is this? You can’t shoot a cop.”

“Is that what you are, Mel? You coulda fooled me.” He fired one shot, muffled by the silencer.

Mel took it right in the gut. He dropped to his knees on the floor and looked up stunned. “Lemme go, Tony,” he whispered. “I can fix things up.” Still he was not pleading. This was the voice of reason.

“Sure you can, Mel. Maybe you can fix up one o’ them first-class tickets—to the Resurrection. So long, Mel,” he said with a tight grin. “Have a good trip.” And he fired twice more till Bernstein slumped against the desk, his eyes still open, stunned as ever. Tony turned toward the door.

“Hey, what about him?” asked Manolo, gesturing towards Ernie with his Ingram.

Tony looked at the bodyguard, who waited stoically by the far wall where the Little League pictures were hung. Tony cocked his head and studied the man, as if he had never quite taken his measure before. There was no question that Ernie was a dead man. All Tony had to do was nod. But he seemed to appraise the bodyguard’s skill in a purely objective way. Till now he had never felt the need of a personal bodyguard. He understood instinctively that the only kind worth having was one who owed you his life, who would thus be loyal as a blood brother. You needed a man who would die for you.

Tony flashed a friendly smile and reverted to Spanish. “You want a job, Ernie?”

“Sure, Tony.”

“Good. Come see me tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

Tony nodded and turned to go. Manolo and Chi-Chi didn’t follow; they knew they were meant to stay and torch the place. Tony clanged down the steps of the fire escape, breathing deep in the chill dawn air. The eastern edge of the sky was already mackerel gray. He trotted around to the front of the building, ignoring the pain in his shoulder. He crossed the street and gave the signal to Martin to carry the box of explosives up to the others. As Martin retrieved it from the back of Manolo’s car, Tony jumped into the Jaguar and peeled off.

It was sometime after five-thirty when he pulled up in front of the condo complex on Brickell Avenue. The doorman looked with dismay at the battered shape of Tony’s car, but he nodded with crisp respect as soon as he recognized Tony. The guard on the twenty-sixth floor was fast asleep. The police dog wagged his tail at Tony. He had to ring the doorbell twice before she finally answered. Her hair was disheveled, and she wore a silk nightgown. Apparently she’d been able to get to sleep after all.

“Tony?” she asked, like she wasn’t sure, even with him standing there. “What happened?”

He reached out and grabbed her hand, then stepped in and closed the door. He drew her across the living room toward the terrace. She didn’t protest. He slid open the glass door, and they stepped outside. The sun was just appearing over the brink of the ocean, yellow and liquid and throbbing with light. The wrinkled sea went from pewter to blue.

“Where’s Frank?” she asked quietly.

“Where do you think?”

They watched the sun for a half-minute more. She touched his cheek with a light hand, feeling of each cut as if she was tracing a line on a map. He could smell her perfume, faint from the night before.

“What do I do now?” she asked.

“Go pack your stuff. We’re going home.”

She nodded and moved past him into the apartment. Tony stepped to the balcony rail and looked down at the dawn-streaked city. Lights still winked in a thousand buildings, as if they were not yet sure of the sun. At the corner of Brickell Avenue, a bright-lit billboard perched on a six-story building. “THE WORLD IS YOURS,” it proclaimed, and below that: “Pan American. To Europe, Africa, South America.”

Right now it is, thought Tony. Right now was all he could be sure of. Because he knew that violence would go with him now like a shadow, he understood that the present was where he would live for the rest of his life. He had no other choice.

He turned from the rising sun and went inside. He wandered through the expensive rooms of Frank Lopez’s penthouse. He found her in the bedroom. A couple of suitcases lay open on the bed, and she stood at the door of a room-size closet, looking so bewildered it was as if she had amnesia. He walked up behind her and stroked her shoulders. The clothes were hung in double rows, a dress for every day of the year, another for every night, it seemed.

“I don’t know what to bring,” she said. She sounded sadder about the business of packing than she had about Frank.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said gently. “I’ll send Nick up tomorrow. Just take what you need right now.”

She turned to look into his eyes, searching there for something she couldn’t seem to name. He couldn’t be sure how drugged she was, or what the drug was at this hour. ’Ludes, probably. She said: “When I met him I didn’t bring anything. We just ran away.” Her gaze seemed to sharpen now. She looked at him so piercingly it scared him. She whispered: “Do you understand?”

“Look, you’re tired—”