Scarface (5 page)

Perhaps it was the nakedness of his accent. Perhaps it had something to do with a black man facing a white man five thousand miles from home. In any case Tony could tell he was lying. There would be no replacements.

They ushered him back to his raft and watched while he poled away upriver. Of course he had no intention of going back. The lieutenant would learn soon enough that he and his men were backed in a corner, without any hope of rescue. Tony went about a mile and beached the raft, pulling it into the trees. Then he doubled back and waited at the edge of the camp. He was too good a guerrilla to be detected. When he had calculated that the night guards were an hour from the end of their watch, their heads nodding over their rifles, he snuck around to the water’s edge where the boats were roped. He slipped away in a rowboat.

It took him two days to reach the coast. For the longest time it was all jungle, with snakes dangling out of the trees above the current and fat macaws bellowing in the branches. At last he came out into a tidal plain where the water buffalo dozed in the eddies. Scarcely a sign of human life, except here and there a village on stilts in the marshes, looking the way it must have looked a thousand years ago. Tony hated it all. He longed for the noise of a city, the crowds and the risks and the scramble for power. He hated this empty virgin land.

The port at the mouth of the river was only two streets deep, barely civilized compared to Luanda. Yet even here the architecture was a kind of colonial gingerbread, improbable and charming. Tony walked about with a giddy sense of freedom, even though he had to keep one eye peeled for the army police. From his days on the docks at Mariel, he knew his way around a harbor. By midday he’d talked with a Spanish sailor who told him the lay of the land. Most of the ships in the harbor had been waiting clearance for months, while the paperwork piled up in the customs office. The customs men had all been recruited into the army. Trade was at a standstill. His own ship had finally received permission to sail for the Mediterranean, full to the gills with hardwood and copra.

That night Tony rowed his boat across the harbor to the Spanish freighter. He monkeyed up the anchor chain, slipped onto the deck, and crabbed across to the aft hold, where he lowered himself into a labyrinth of mahogany logs. Exhausted, he fell asleep against the rough and fragrant bark—and woke up two hours later with a little scream, as a spider six inches across sank its teeth in his shoulder.

He lay delirious with fever for three days, unable to move. The heat was brutal in the hold, and he sweated ten pounds and went into shock. The water was choppy in the mid-Atlantic, so the logs were always shifting and rumbling. A hundred times he was nearly crushed. He would have been dead for certain the night of the third day, except for a quirk in the transport of hardwood. They had to vent the hold a couple of times a week, so the wood gases wouldn’t build up too much pressure. Rot would set in if the cargo was kept sealed. So they lifted the hatch.

If he hadn’t been so sick, they probably would have thrown him to the sharks. After waiting two months for the clearance to leave, they didn’t need any trouble with immigration. But they could see he was Spanish, and so took pity on him. They nursed him back with coconut milk. By the time they’d reached Gibraltar he was rational again. They told him they were bound for Marseilles. He hadn’t ever so much as looked at a map of Europe, but as long as it wasn’t Africa he was satisfied. The last few days at sea, he worked with the crew and got his strength back. Cuba seemed like a dream he’d had. The whole world on the other side of the fever was just a mass of shadows now.

When they docked in Marseilles, he stayed on board to help unload the cargo. When the immigration men came on to check the sailors’ papers, he managed to slip away just as he’d arrived, down the anchor chain like a water rat. As he lay drying off in the sun at the end of the pier, he realized he had nothing. Just the secondhand clothes of a Spanish sailor. He would never go to Florida now, he thought. He would never see his family or his friends again. He thought of the fifteen thousand cash going moldy in the biscuit tin, and he laughed out loud. He’d never felt so free in his life.

He nosed around for a couple of weeks doing odd jobs on the docks, for bosses who didn’t inquire too much about his credentials as long as he’d work for three dollars a day. He scaled fish at a cannery from dawn to noon, then spent the rest of the day wandering about, talking to the old fishermen in a kind of waterfront pidgin. After a while he was able to figure out where he was by looking at sailors’ charts. He who had grown up thinking that Cuba and Miami constituted the major poles of the world now saw what a puny corner they occupied. The sailors pointed out Angola, and they pointed out Marseilles, and suddenly he had a new respect for the vastness of things.

He liked the restless feel of the port city, where it didn’t really matter how much French you spoke, where nobody asked too many questions. He found himself an attic room in the house of a blind widow, and though he grew restless with the cannery work, he managed to steal a bicycle one day. This he used for long afternoon rides up into the hills, through the medieval perched villages to the monasteries and ruined castles that had lined this route since Roman times. For weeks he was content to be by himself, poking about like a tourist.

He learned just enough French to eat by. On Saturday nights he visited a waterfront brothel, where he paid nearly half his cannery wages to stay all night, always with a different woman. He wanted nobody else in his life just then, neither friend nor lover. If someone had pinned him down, he would have said he was resting. For once he had no plans to escape, or perhaps he was trying to give fate the slip. He even put on some weight. Where he’d come out of prison lean and tight, his face hawk-thin with its burning eyes, now he ate whole loaves of bread from the basket of his bicycle as he drove around. He guzzled forty-cent wine from a goatskin. From the look of him he was settling down to be a lazy Bohemian. After a couple of months he wouldn’t have looked out of place with a sketchpad, wearing a beret.

But if anyone thought he had outgrown his ambition and put away his dreams, they were much mistaken. It was just that for once he wasn’t in any rush. It didn’t take him long to find out he’d landed in the heroin capitol of the world. He was also smart enough to know it wasn’t in the same league as selling reefer in the slum alleys. The market wasn’t local at all. But he knew that every operation of this kind needed runners and bagmen, and they might be glad of a man without a country, especially somebody trained to kill.

He went at it very, very slowly. He haunted the waterfront night after night, and gradually fell in with a couple of street dealers, two-bit hoods no older than he. He knew the type like the back of his hand. They had no ambition except to get stoned and stay stoned. Tony didn’t push them. He simply let it be known that he had some experience dealing weed and that he was always open to a proposition. Then he sauntered away, prepared to wait for months if he had to.

Then things began to accelerate, as if fate had caught on to his casual ways and decided to make him jump. One morning at the cannery, word went around that an immigration team was raiding along the docks, looking for illegal aliens. The foreman tried to cut a deal with Tony, proposing to get him a French passport on the black market. Tony could see it was a setup, that the foreman was probably in collusion with immigration. He refused and quit on the spot. He didn’t want a passport anyway. He liked being unattached.

Because of the heat from immigration, the job market suddenly dried up. Now Tony had no choice but crime. For a couple of days he picked pockets in the city parks and cased a few shops and banks, but his heart wasn’t in it. He grew wistful for the days when he and Manolo used to talk their way into the houses of the rich in Havana and pocket everything that wasn’t nailed down. There he had had his first real taste of privilege. That was what he wanted now, more than he wanted to shoot up a bank and paw through bags of currency.

Restless and brooding, he stopped on his way out one morning to ask the widow if she needed anything. Almost in spite of himself he’d permitted a certain friendly intercourse between them. Perhaps he’d let down his guard because she was blind: there was no way she could finger him. He was almost shamefaced when he did errands for her, as if he feared somebody would notice and accuse him of being a good boy.

He found her out in the kitchen yard, washing clothes in a big tin tub. As they exchanged a few minimal words of French, he happened to glance along the clothesline. Billowing there and drying in the sun was a whole wardrobe of priest’s vestments—cassock and surplice and collar, hand-edged linen, richly brocaded capes shimmering with Easter. When Tony asked where it all came from, the blind woman proudly explained that she worked in rotation with three other women of the parish to keep the monsignor spotless.

Without even really thinking, Tony walked to the end of the line and lifted down a black cassock. The widow noticed nothing as she hummed along at her work. Tony plucked a couple of collars off the line, called good day to his landlady, then raced back up to his room. The cassock was still faintly damp under the arms and along the hem, but he couldn’t wait. He pinned the collar in place and ducked into the widow’s bedroom to borrow her Bible. Then he was off to the western edge of the city, where the white-walled villas were tiered above the sea on the first flank of the Riviera.

It was as easy to get in as it used to be when Manolo feigned a stomach ache. In halting French, his black eyes rapt with saintliness, Tony explained he was taking up a collection to build a children’s hospital. The deep-tanned Riviera matrons, wearing halter tops and bubble glasses and heavy gold bangle earrings, had just enough reflex left from all that convent training that they couldn’t turn him away. They ushered him in, running upstairs to grab a robe and fish some bank notes out of their Hermès wallets. And quick as a cat thief Tony would dart through the downstairs rooms, pocketing silver and bibelots.

As he staggered home that evening, the pockets of his cassock laden down with treasure, he was totally exhilarated. He set out all his loot around his room, not bothering even to think about what he should take to the pawnbrokers. Of the cash he’d collected for his bogus charity, he only kept a few hundred francs. The lion’s share he brought next morning to the church near the docks, depositing it in the poor box when nobody was looking. He knew he was just being superstitious, but also he seemed to want to prove he was in it for something besides the money.

His act got better and better. He mesmerized the women of the villas—it was almost always a woman, whose husband was out making his fortune or dawdling with his mistress. They begged Tony to stay for lemonade. They served him lunch on their dazzling terraces, with a view out over the Mediterranean that seemed like a kind of sin it was so gaudy. They couldn’t have been more well-mannered in the presence of a priest. All their virginal modesty seemed to come back to them. Unconsciously they began to confess, spilling out the misery and boredom of their lives to the dark-eyed Spanish priest with the dueling scar and the air of a pirate.

Tony never tired of it, and more curiously still, he was not overcome with desire. Even without the protection of the cassock, he wouldn’t have made a move to seduce even the most beautiful of them. Perhaps his experience with the general’s woman had left him gun-shy. Yet he seemed to be after something deeper than pleasure. For this was the princess class that lived in the villas above the sea. He saw them in all their splendid isolation, accoutred in limpid silks and lying about in rooms cushioned like a jewel box.

What was he after? Was he there to learn how their men kept them, so he would know when he came to occupy a castle of his own? Or did he really want to know what the boredom was like—the long afternoons on the telephone, the desultory shopping—so as to be sure it would never happen to any woman of his?

He couldn’t say. All he knew was, he had to go back to the villas day after day. He’d ring a new doorbell and wait, a shiver of excitement creeping up his spine, till the door was opened by some new vision of sultriness, her lips wet with longing, a restless glint in her haunted eyes. Meanwhile, his room grew cluttered with treasures. Every surface was covered with clocks and china dogs and silver ashtrays and jade figurines. Tony could have opened a pawn shop himself. Every now and then he would give a trinket to one of the whores, but otherwise his store of riches seemed to have no plan, no scheme, no purpose.

He developed such a perfect air of detachment, the hoods on the docks began to be drawn to him. When he drifted about the waterfront bars at night, no longer a priest but still somehow desireless, the small-time gangsters bought him drinks and hinted at certain deals. Tony kept his distance, not yet ready to commit himself till someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was no more interested in getting too involved with any particular criminal than he was with any particular woman. He still went to the brothel on Saturday night, and still he demanded a new girl every time. None of these could remotely be called a princess.

Tony Montana was a happy man that rainy afternoon when he passed the sweetshop. He had just changed out of his priest’s attire, having spent the morning with the wife of an industrialist, wandering through her rose garden. He had a meeting that night with a dealer who was going to introduce him to the next link up in the chain of command. There was a chance to do some runner work over the border into Switzerland. Tony had everything in place. For once he was not the prey of forces, but had set things up so he was free of everybody else’s needs.

In the sweetshop window was a tray of marzipan fruit—strawberries, figs, apricots. He smiled, remembering the widow’s passion for candy. On an impulse he headed inside, patting the pocket of his sailor’s pants and realizing he had no money. He chuckled softly, since for once he’d had no thought of stealing. But the old proprietor was busy, weighing chocolate for a bunch of kids, so it was the easiest thing in the world for Tony to lean into the window and scoop up a handful of marzipan. He stuffed his hand in his pocket, turned around and slipped out the door—right into the arms of a scowling cop.