Scarface (27 page)

“I always run away, Tony.”

She stared in his eyes a moment longer, as if to give him the chance to back out now before it was too late. To break the silence he leaned forward and brushed her lips gently with his. It wasn’t quite so forward as a kiss. It demanded nothing. As he drank in the smell of her she pulled gently away. She moved across the room to the table beside the bed, where she opened a drawer and drew out an eighth of cocaine. Then she walked to the door and out, without a backward glance.

By the time he followed her into the living room, she was already out the apartment door and drifting toward the elevator—still barefoot, still in her nightgown. She had apparently taken him at his word: all she needed right now was her coke. Tony ducked into a closet and grabbed the first thing he saw, a full-length lynx coat. Then he walked out of the apartment to where she was waiting by the elevator, patting the snout of the guard dog and murmuring endearments. Tony left the door of Frank’s apartment wide open, figuring the cops would be here before long. The twenty-sixth floor guard was still sound asleep in his chair at the end of the hall.

Tony slipped the coat over her shoulders as the elevator arrived. They stepped inside, and the dog whined slightly, as if he understood that the mistress of 2620 would not be coming back. They descended in silence, but she nuzzled close to Tony, burying her face in his chest. As he held her in the rippling fur he felt an incredible surge of power, as if the elevator were shooting up like a rocket instead of bringing them down to the ground.

When they stepped out into the lobby, the guards on duty didn’t bat an eye. They were too well bred to stare at her naked feet. As she glided across to the glass doors, Tony’s protective arm around her shoulders, she waved vaguely, a little girl’s goodbye. Then she and Tony passed out into the driveway.

As they headed to the Jaguar an old pensioner, out for his morning jog, stopped to buy a newspaper at a vending machine on the curb. He watched the two figures approach the car. He didn’t seem to notice how rumpled Tony looked, his arm in a sling and one eye puffy, any more than he noticed the battered condition of the Jaguar. What the old man riveted on was the sleepy figure of Elvira, barefoot and loose in the voluminous coat. He felt a terrible pang of jealousy as he watched Tony help her into the passenger’s side. They had clearly stayed up all night, partying and making love. The old man felt like an old fool as Tony revved the Jag and gunned off up the street. He felt as if his life had been a bust.

And whoever they were in the Jaguar, it seemed the world belonged to them.

Chapter Seven

I
T ALL WENT even faster after that. The moment the news got out that Frank was dead, several of the major dealers made contact with Tony. He was able to work out a consortium that would guarantee Sosa his hundred and fifty kilos a month. The other dealers were more than glad to take Tony’s terms, since they feared they would meet the same fate as Frank Lopez if they didn’t get in with Tony right away. It had always been an unwritten law among them that none of the others would kill them once they’d become a king, at least not until all avenues of deal-making had been exhausted. Tony was something they’d never seen at the top before. He didn’t care how high up somebody was; if they stood in his way they were dead. He shot first and asked questions later, but not many.

There were perhaps twenty coke kings in the Dade County area at the time that Tony Montana blew away the Lopez empire. There was no hard and fast set of rules as to when a man became a king, no code of chivalry, no book of princely goals, not even a financial requirement. One simply knew. Most of these men had hit the boom time at about the same time that cocaine itself did—suddenly, explosively. They were weed dealers making a cool million a year for three years running, with a sideline in coke, and suddenly coke went through the roof and they were pulling in fifteen, twenty mill a year. Tax-free. Down to their toes they didn’t want to lose this Midas life. Keep the peace at all costs, they figured. There was enough for everyone, by which they meant enough for the twenty or twenty-five of them who’d clawed their way to the top of the snow-capped mountain.

Tony was merely offering them a terrific investment, after all. Sosa’s price was better than anything they could do. They put up all the front money, Tony put up none, and they split the coke in equal shares. Tony got about a fourth of it. Broken down into grams, it worked out to roughly 37,000 units a month. Much of this was job-lotted to smaller dealers, so Tony was taking in maybe sixty dollars a gram. Two-point-two million a month, and the whole structure was in place within four weeks, since Tony was able to take over the lion’s share of Frank’s client list. Some of the clients he parceled out to his partners in the consortium, just to keep everyone happy.

The work was staggering, of course. Tony was on the phone to Sosa in Bolivia twice a day, trading all the latest rumors as to busts and bribes and traffic foul-ups. He had a payroll of forty, from the bone-thin pharmacist who cut the coke to the Marielito punks who bagged the Quaaludes and ounced the marijuana, for Tony quickly saw that he had to diversify his product. A couple of times a month he would find himself on a jungle airstrip two hours’ flying time from Bogota, negotiating with wild men in ruined double-breasted European suits, while an ancient B-26 was being loaded in the background with bales of marijuana. He practically commuted to Panama City.

With the help of George Sheffield, Tony set up the Montana Realty Company in Little Havana for the laundering of funds. This was a storefront operation, and it offered wonderful bargains to the Cuban population. Blocks of bungalows were saved from the condo developers and made available to blue-collar workers who hadn’t had a proper home since they fled Cuba at the start of the revolution. Tony got an overnight reputation for generosity and civic duty. Within weeks the Chamber of Commerce was itching to give him a plaque.

Then they set up the Montana Diamond Trading Company, in a cubbyhole office above a drugstore on Calle Ocho. Here they could launder massive amounts, as they tapped into the international gem market and opened a phony office in The Netherlands, as well as several bank accounts in Basil. Things went like clockwork at the money end.

Still there were problems. Gaspar, one of the original gang, was ambushed one night and blown up in his car; and they never found out who did it. The little dealers were always shooting each other for petty cash, and in order to keep things quiet, Tony was caught in an enormous spiral of bribes among the cops and judges. The newspaper headlines grew more and more lurid: “Raid Nets 100 Million Dollar Cocaine Stash”; “135 Drug-Related Homicides So Far This Year.” There was a
Time
magazine coke cover. The Feds appointed commission after commission to make it all stop. They had no real effect, of course, but they made things very complicated.

Tony bought an old mansion in the most exclusive section of Coral Gables which had been Wasp since the days of Ponce de Leon. It had acres of lawns and a boat dock on a canal and beautiful stands of live oak hung with Spanish moss. Tony surrounded the whole property with a sophisticated electronic fence, and he sent in crew upon crew of workers to rejuvenate and swank up the old white-columned house. While the ringing of hammers went on inside, Tony erected a big neon sign on the front lawn. “THE WORLD IS YOURS,” it said.

During the months of reconstruction Tony and Elvira lived in a posh marina on Biscayne Bay, on a fifty-eight-foot boat that Tony picked up for a steal in Panama. That is, he literally stole it, as reprisal against a Panamanian official who screwed up a customs operation that left a dozen mules in jail. Neatly lettered along the hull was the boat’s new name:
Elvira.

The lady herself had gone into a long funk following the death of Frank Lopez. For weeks she never left the yacht, but could be seen leaning over the rail for hours at a time, staring out at the waters of the bay as if she was on a cruise to nowhere. Tony was so busy getting his empire into place that he only saw her late at night, when she paced their gaudy silken cabin, all wired up from the day’s cocaine and rambling out the story of her past. She didn’t seem to mind Tony’s presence, though she hardly seemed to focus on him. She was even crazed to make love, and they did so every night, but especially then she was somewhere else, lost in a furious reverie that sometimes left her sobbing when she came.

Tony didn’t mind. Now that he possessed her he was full of an extraordinary patience. He could see what a wrenching, broken life she’d led—betrayed by her bankrupt parents, drifting from one bad man to another, stoned on her drug of choice since she was eighteen—and he knew it would take some time before she understood she was safe at last. What he really meant to do was restore her to her heritage. None of the mess and chaos of her life had destroyed the royal lineaments in her face. All she needed to rule was the kingdom of his heart, and together they would triumph. He could not be king without her. Power was not enough.

Meanwhile he filled the yacht with presents. During the week of her birthday she found a Cartier box on her breakfast tray every morning, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of her birthstone—diamonds, of course—before the week was out. She smiled in a dreamy, melancholy way as she opened each, and she always wore the day’s jewel to bed that night when they turned to make love. She seemed to understand that in some things Tony was determined to outdo Frank. When she wouldn’t leave the boat, streams of salesmen would arrive from various pricey stores, laden down with boxes. If she wouldn’t go shopping, the shopping would come to her. Her vials of cocaine were refilled every morning, no questions asked.

It was Tony’s idea that they get married. She had never been coy about it, maintaining staunchly since the day they met that marriage wasn’t for her. Tony had been in business about three months, they were due to move into the mansion in a couple of weeks, and he started to push the notion. She didn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no. Perhaps she was beginning to recover from the past. She was even willing to go out again, and they dropped by the Babylon several nights a week, where the rest of the cocaine royalty paid them court. They were beautiful to look at then, and they sometimes caught themselves looking at their reflection in the smoky mirrors that lined the walls. Then they would wink and smile through the mirror, as if they were invincible.

One day she opened one of the boxes from the stores, and in it was a bridal gown. She put it on and drifted about the boat for several hours, standing again at the rail and looking off to sea as if somebody had jilted her. When Tony came aboard late that night, she was lying in bed in the gown, propped against the pillows and reading
Rolling Stone.
A string of lines was tapped out on the coke mirror on the bedside table. Tony shot her a questioning look, and she shrugged her puff sleeves and said: “What the hell, let’s do it.”

He poured money into it. He had the garden of the mansion entirely relandscaped to accommodate two hundred guests, hauling in truckloads of white rose bushes and shrill albino peacocks. A caterer was brought from New York. An organ was installed among the live oaks. Limousines were sent for all the guests. To the neighbors it looked like a convergence of funerals backed up along the street, but then they were so upset about the neon sign, which showed no sign of being removed, they weren’t awfully rational when it came to the Montana place. The neighborhood had gone downhill with the force of a nuclear bomb.

The guests were in any case a motley assortment, emerging from the limousines looking like pimps and hookers, bodyguards at their sides, bulges in their pockets, rather as if they had come to attend a convention of Murder Incorporated, South Florida chapter. It was a brilliant thing Tony had done. There had not yet been a big family celebration to bring together the cocaine overlords. Echeverria came, and the Diaz Brothers with their chorus girl wives. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t open fire on one another before the week was out, but the event somehow defined them all as a social class of the highest blood. Tony’s wedding marked the occasion of his ascendancy among the kings, all in recognition of the dramatic boost he had given the local economy by dint of his deal with Sosa. The overlords let it happen because they needed a charismatic figure, and Tony was their JFK.

Fifty of the men sitting on pink satin folding chairs on Tony’s lawn, then, were gangsters of one stripe or another. Gina, whom Tony had set up in a beauty salon of her own next door to Montana Realty, beat the bushes all over Dade County and came up with a list of relatives or pretty near, neighbors from the slum alleys of Havana, even the nun who’d taught Tony his catechism. Mama had finally agreed to come at the last minute. It was her stated intention never to set foot in Tony’s house, but after all the wedding was in the garden.

Elvira was represented, except for some few girlfriends (cokefriends, more accurately) and a couple of pansy dance partners, by a single Maryland aunt, Miss Theodora Evans. This estimable lady, who owned a tiny bookstore and art gallery in Annapolis, had been the black sheep of Elvira’s family when such things mattered, her reputation mostly founded on a two-weeks’ indiscretion with a flaming radical during the summer of her twentieth year. The flaming radical was from Harvard. Bohemian herself, Miss Theodora Evans had always supposed that her niece was living in Florida among artsy types, perhaps on a houseboat. She therefore dealt with the gangsters at the wedding as if they were violently avant-garde, painters maybe or composers.