Scarface (32 page)

T
HE HELICOPTER CAME in over the mountain in dazzling sunlight, landing on the pad as neatly as a Cochabamba butterfly lighting on a flower. Tony climbed out followed by Ernie, who served as his bodyguard now on all international runs. Tony couldn’t stand to have bodyguards around him in Miami; they made him feel caged. He walked across the throbbing green lawn toward Sosa’s Villa. It was his first trip here in a couple of months, his first time out of the country since being busted.

Sosa stood up and waved from the terrace. As Tony approached, he could see there were several men lounging under the arbor having their midday coffee. He didn’t recognize any of them. Sosa walked forward with open arms, grinning brightly as he engulfed Tony in a bear hug. They spoke one another’s names with feeling, as if they were family.

“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” said Sosa, one arm around Tony’s shoulders as he led him toward the arbor. “How’s Elvira?”

“Great, just great. And Gabriella?”

Sosa sighed with contentment. “Three more months, Tony. I can’t believe it.” He gave Tony’s arm an affectionate squeeze. “How ’bout you, amigo? When we gonna see another little Tony?”

“I’m workin’ on it,” Tony said with a tight smile.

“I guess you’ll have to work harder, huh?” Sosa laughed, but Tony could feel a certain reserve in him, consonant with the other men in the circle under the arbor, who now stood up to greet him. “I want you to meet some friends of mine,” said Sosa, starting at the left, rather as if they were going through a receiving line at an embassy. “This is Pedro Feliz, chairman of Tropical Sugar in Bolivia . . . Tony Montana.”

“A pleasure,” said Feliz, clicking his heels a bit as he shook Tony’s hand. He looked like the fly-by-night
presidente
of a dirt-poor banana republic.

Then came General Jorge Navarro, Commander of the First Army Corps, with a breastplate of ribbons and only one arm. Then César Albini, of the Ministry of the Interior, his eyes as blank and pitiless as the jungle wastes he administered. Then Charles Cookson of Washington, crew-cut and Brooks-Brothered. This one even smelled like a government type. They were all very glad to meet Tony, they said.

Sosa called over his black aide and said: “Please have Alberto come out now.” The aide disappeared into the house. Sosa gestured Tony to a chair in the middle of the group, and they all sat down. Sosa personally prepared Tony’s coffee. As he handed it over, he said: “Tony, I want to discuss something that concerns all of us here.”

“Go ahead, Noldo, I’m listening.” Tony sipped his coffee and noticed that Ernie had been ushered to the far end of the arbor, where he stood around with a group of four or five brutal-looking men. Suddenly he realized these were the bodyguards of all the big honchos sitting around Sosa’s table. This struck him so funny he grinned. The other men at the table shifted nervously. They didn’t like the grin.

“Tony,
you
have a problem and
we
have a problem,” said Sosa. “I think we can solve yours and you can solve ours. We understand that you’re having some difficulty with taxes. It looks like you’re gonna have to do some time. This distresses us, Tony. We don’t like to see a friend in jail, and frankly, we wouldn’t want any interruption in our deal. Mr. Cookson here has some good connections in Washington who tell us these troubles of yours can be taken care of. Maybe you’ll have to pay a fine and some back interest, but you won’t have to serve any time. How does that strike you?”

All the men’s eyes were on Tony. He was startled. He thought he’d come down to renegotiate the monthly flow of the drug. No one had prepared him for this. He turned to Sosa and said: “And your problem, Noldo?”

Just then Alberto, the man they called the Shadow, materialized on the veranda. He focused his venomous eyes on Tony. “You remember Alberto,” said Sosa. Tony nodded. The Shadow stood at attention, ready to kill. “Our problem, Tony, is somebody’s making a lot of noise in the States about the way we do business down here. This person is very influential. People are starting to listen to him. He’s a communist. Alberto here is going to help solve our problem. As you know, he’s an expert in the disposal business.” Sosa permitted himself the smallest smile, which Tony returned. This was all by way of an homage to Omar. “The difficulty is, Alberto doesn’t know his way around the States too well. He needs a guide.” Sosa paused to light a cigarette. Tony locked eyes with Alberto, whose eyes were not human at all. “You think you could help us out?”

Tony looked around at the faces of the men assembled in Sosa’s arbor. Together they constituted the whole power network of the drug trade in Bolivia. He could see they treated him as an equal. His money, his daring business sense, his meteoric rise—all of this assured him a place at the council table. What struck him here was that he was by far the youngest of them, by ten years at least. He could see the hunger in all the men’s faces to be as young as he was.

“No problem, Noldo,” said Tony, grinning around the circle.

In the packed auditorium at New York’s City College, Aristidio Gutierrez was just winding up a most passionate address. He was a dark, intense, distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties, with a thatch of unruly hair that looked as if it had never been combed, bushy eyebrows that jumped about when he talked, and great baggy eyes like a hound’s. Behind him on the stage, where the white and green Bolivian flag stood adjacent to the stars and stripes, Gutierrez’s wife sat proudly, her eyes radiant behind thick glasses. Assorted deans and political types made up the rest of the half-circle that sat behind the hero. Most of his audience was Latin, exiles of one stripe or another, and those Americans who sat among them glowed with a counter-cultural fire. They could have been attending any leftist rally of the last forty years. It was surely the first time in the annals of political oppression that a crowd of idealists had turned out to protest cocaine.

“This ruthless oligarchy of generals and big businessmen,” said Gutierrez, “is dedicated to just one thing—growing richer and richer. They pour their cocaine profits into their Swiss bank accounts. They sit in their mountain kingdoms drinking champagne while the poor eat rats and smother their starving children. These pirates have declared war on the Bolivian people! We will cut them out like cancer!”

The applause welled up, and he shouted in Spanish the words of a song of liberty, and the crowd broke into unruly cheering. In Row VV, on the aisle, Tony Montana the king of Miami sat listening. Every minute or so he touched his nose, as if he had an allergy to populist rhetoric. Beside him sat the Shadow, his face a mask of death. Tony had had that feeling all day long, from the moment they landed at Kennedy—the feeling that he was leading Death around. He never felt this about himself, not even when he was going out to kill someone. But he felt it now with the Shadow. This Alberto was more than a man with a gun. He was like an infection.

“Ten thousand of our brothers,” shouted Gutierrez, “are being tortured and held without trial. Another six thousand have simply disappeared. You Americans cannot know what it means to be a disappeared person. In Latin America the rivers run with the blood of the disappeared.”

Here Gutierrez began to cough, or he had a frog in his throat, for he reached for the pitcher of water and poured out a glass. The audience was absolutely silent as he drank. There wasn’t a single one of them who wasn’t thinking hard about what it meant to be “disappeared.” Well, perhaps the Shadow wasn’t. But Tony was.

Gutierrez cleared his throat and leaned into the microphone and continued: “Unless the U.S. government sets an example soon, by calling for the observation of fundamental human rights, by stopping this endless sale of tanks and bombs and planes to the gangsters who run my country . . .”

The cheering swelled to a fever pitch, practically drowning him out. The Shadow tapped Tony’s arm to indicate they had seen enough. They slipped unnoticed into the aisle. Hundreds of people were hurtling out of their seats now, shouting. “Viva Gutierrez!” they clamored. “Viva Bolivia!”

“. . . I can promise you not only that the cause of human freedom and dignity in Latin America will once again be strangled in its cradle, but that the sickness is
here
now, on
your
shores. It is worming its way to the heart of your once-proud democracy!”

Pandemonium now. The crowd surged forward, besieging the stage. “Gutierrez! Gutierrez!” they cried. The Shadow hurried quickly out of the auditorium, as if the cheering of his enemy made him physically ill. Tony lingered a moment at the door, looking back once over his shoulder. Gutierrez had come to the lip of the stage, where he reached out his hands so they could touch him. Tony was startled to feel how deep the man had impressed him, and not just because of the heat he created. He would have stayed longer to watch if the Shadow had not been waiting.

As he stepped outside in the chilly autumn rain he drew from his pocket a bullet of coke and snorted, twice in each nostril. The Shadow stood on the curb, looking up at the bright-lit buildings with his mouth slightly open, for the moment as much of a hick as a tourist from Nowhere, U.S.A. Manolo was parked in an alley across the street, and as soon as he saw them he streaked out and pulled to the curb beside them. Tony opened the door and held it for the Shadow, smiling as the killer drew his rapt gaze from the giant panorama of Manhattan. Alberto suddenly realized that Tony had seen his awestruck state, and his eyes now frosted over as he ducked into the car.

“It’s a piece o’ cake,” said Tony as Manolo drove away. “Guy don’t even have a bodyguard.” He shook his head with distaste. “Real stupid, huh? It’s like he’s askin’ for it.”

“So we’re on for Thursday then,” said Manolo.

“Yeah, Thursday,” Tony said wearily. He turned and looked at the Shadow in the back seat, who now sat staring forward with no expression at all. Tony didn’t see why they couldn’t just wait in an alley and put a bullet through Gutierrez as he stepped out into the rain. Why did they have to go back to Miami and spend a day making a bomb? It was all getting too political. Killing was one thing, terrorism quite another. Tony willed himself not to think about it. He pulled out his coke and snorted again, thinking only of those three years he would not be in a cage. Yet the phrase kept repeating in his head:
the disappeared ones.
He could almost see their faces. He couldn’t see why they had to die for the sake of the drug traffic. Everyone Tony had ever killed had at least deserved to die.

The next night in Miami, Tony and Elvira and Manolo went out to celebrate the three years Tony was about to be given back. He’d spent the whole day doing errands with the Shadow. At Bob’s Discount they picked up aluminum baking pans, cookie sheets, black electrical tape, rubber garden gloves. At a Radio Shack they got wire cutters and a soldering iron and slide switch. At a nameless, faceless house off Calle Ocho they met with a whacked-out Vietnam vet who sold them a briefcase full of C4 plastique, with detonating cords and blasting caps. The Shadow was left in the boathouse by the canal to assemble his bomb, with Nick and Chi-Chi guarding him. It wasn’t stated out loud, but the bombwork was being done a hundred yards away from the house in case of a slip-up.

By the time they arrived at The Beachhead on Arthur Godfrey Road, Tony and Elvira and Manolo were completely loaded, giggling uncontrollably as they entered the Wasp bastion. The place was full of proper millionaires—developers who’d tossed old ladies out in the cold, proper sorts like that. As the maitre d’ led them across to a table, they were slightly weaving and had to hold on to one another. They swayed like a conga line, and a couple of sour-faced diners drew back in dismay. Just as Manolo and Elvira slumped into a booth, Tony recognized someone a couple of tables away. Grinning happily, he lurched over and slapped his hand on the shoulder of a heavy-set man at a round table of six people.

“Hey Vic,” said Tony, “I watch your show every day.”

The man craned around, with a toss of his leonine white head of hair. His eyes were glazed with the sort of patrician annoyance reserved for bores in restaurants. “Oh, is that so? How nice,” he said, though it didn’t
sound
very nice.

“Yeah, I think you got the best drug coverage around. Virgil Train—Channel 2, ya know him?—he’s a friend o’ mine. Does a real nice spot every coupla weeks. But you got it all over him, Vic. You got drugs on practically every night. We’re real proud o’ you, pal.”

Victor Shepard’s face was drained of all color. He didn’t know what to say. Tony was talking double fast and pouring on the charm. All the other conversations at Shepard’s table had stopped. They were totally intrigued by the man with the scar.

“Just one little thing, huh Vic? You know that two hundred kilo DEA bust you was congratulatin’ the cops for the other night?”

Vic’s brow furrowed. “Aren’t you . . . Tony Montana?” The five rich people sitting around him gasped in recognition.

Tony beamed. “Yeah, that’s me.” He shook off Manolo’s arm, who’d come to retrieve him. He winked around the table at the fatcats. “Hi folks, don’t get up. Anyway Vic, you should check it out. I heard like it was two hundred and
twenty
kilos went down. That mean’s twenty’s missing, right? The way
I
figure, anyway. Why don’t you ask your friends the cops about that?” He slapped Shepard’s shoulder again. “Hey, keep up the good work, Vic. Don’t believe everything you hear, okay? Have a good dinner now. Nice to meet you people.”

Waving a cheery farewell, he turned away from the table and sauntered back to his own, Manolo clucking fretfully beside him. “Hey Tony, that wasn’t cool,” he said. “Shepard’s got a lotta friends.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” retorted Tony, sliding into the booth beside Elvira. “He’s an asshole! Never fuckin’ tells the truth on TV. That’s the trouble with this country. Nobody tells the truth. Ain’t that right?” he asked the wincing waiter, who nodded fearfully and begged to know what drinks they would like to have.

And they all laughed at him for being afraid of them, because he was just a poor Cuban himself. Tony and Manolo laughed because they remembered huddling in the linen closet back at the Havanito Restaurante, looking out through the linen chute at the gold-chained couples and the coked-up dealers. Elvira laughed because she was in the mood to find everything funny about the desperate tacky glamour of a millionaire’s restaurant on Arthur Godfrey Road.