Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

"Allison, you dragged it into your steakhouse, not me. You told Jay he could finish his real estate deal in the Havana Room. You started this. You thought you attracted him, you let him work you."

"What do you mean?" She was figuring things quickly. "Is this about that woman named O, the woman he sees?"

I shook my head, stunned by how little she knew. "There is no woman named O. Jay picked you out, for something else."

"What?"

It was too late not to explain. "I'm sorry to tell you this, Allison. It's not what you want to hear-"

"Just tell me."

So I did. "Jay picked you out. He figured out exactly where you lived, the floor, everything."

"Why?"

"He wanted to look across the street."

She stared at me, not sure whether to be hurt or furious. "The living room window?"

I glanced at Poppy, then back at her.

"He was always at the window. We used to sit and talk. That's what we liked to do. It was sweet, you know?"

I nodded again, slowly.

"The girl?"

"Yes."

"Who is she?"

I checked Poppy again. He looked cold, a little out of it, munching his mouth in rumination.

"Who is she, Bill?"

I turned back to Allison. "His fourteen-year-old daughter."

She was a proud woman, Allison Sparks. She had a big job and an independent life, plenty of money, and a funny little drug habit, so basically she thought she knew the score, especially when it came to men, because, I supposed, she did not at heart trust them. And so here was proof that her vanity and passion had hidden the truth from her, which was that a man she'd liked a great deal had not found her attractive, but had let her think so, simply so that he could look out of her window. "Oh God," she muttered, dropping a hand against the hood of the truck. "He told you this?"

"I sort of figured it out, then he admitted it."

She stared dumbly at the windshield.

"Let's get Poppy inside, let's get this done with," I said.

She didn't have it in her to protest.

"All right, Poppy," I told him.

"Can you move this?" Allison asked Ha, pointing at the heavy, old truck.

Ha nodded. "I park it down the street."

Poppy let me lift him up. The bottle fell to the well of the truck, the liquor pouring out of it. He didn't notice. I wanted to get him inside until Marceno came, try to get him sobered up a bit so that Marceno would believe him. I took both of his arms as he stood and slipped a hand under him. He leaned heavily against me, and he smelled bad. But he made it over the pavement.

Allison opened the front door. We lurched into the foyer. Poppy leaned over the maitre d's lectern.

"Gimme something to- wait, wait-" Poppy pointed to the Havana Room door. "In there, I want privacy."

I looked to Allison.

"Well, we're closed for lunch Mondays."

"But do you have staff coming in, to clean or whatever?"

"Not until much later, four o'clock. We open at six for dinner. It's just me and Ha here now. Of course, this is exactly what I was hoping to do on my only morning off!" She looked at her watch. "I mean, I didn't leave this place until one o'clock last night."

She unlocked the Havana Room door. "Can you make it down the steps?"

"Of course," Poppy groaned.

But he couldn't, not really, and I kept him up as he staggered down the stairs. The long room was dark and I smelled smoked-out cigars. I found a light. The enormous nude loomed over the bar, her dark eyes considering me. Poppy slumped into one of the booths, his head down. "Gimme something to write with."

"I think you need some coffee, maybe something to eat."

Poppy lifted his eyes. "Forget that. Give me a pen or something." He pulled an embossed HAVANA ROOM napkin from the holder. I turned on the sconce light near his head, leaning close enough to see the broken capillaries in his nose, then handed him my pen. He had trouble holding it, more trouble than the first time I'd seen him. He looked at his hand and couldn't seem to make a fist. "I mighta broke this."

"How?"

He looked up, eyes half closed. "I tried to fight back yesterday, for a minute. They found me. They knew right where I was."

"Who?"

"Some-" He looked at the pen and threw it aside. "I got no hands!" he bellowed wetly. "Come on, gimme something-"

Allison came down the stairs and turned the light on over the bar. She seemed to have regained her composure. I studied her back in the mirror, the curve of her shoulders, her neck. Despite myself, I remembered her curled up in her bed. "I have pens, pencils…"

"No!" Poppy cried, eyes almost shut, head bobbing a bit. I wondered if he was suffering from a concussion. Hard to say, with the whiskey in him.

Allison seemed to think the same thing. "He looks bad, Bill. Like he's half asleep or something. Maybe I should call an ambulance."

Poppy showed his rotten yellow teeth. "Don't call no one."

"Here, here." Allison fished in her purse and produced a gleaming gold tube of lipstick. She popped off the top and twisted up half an inch of the red stick.

"Wait," I said, "I want you to tell somebody else this, not us."

"I ain't got time." Poppy took the lipstick and leaned over the napkin like a tired but obedient child trying to do homework he didn't quite understand. "I'm leaving this for him, then getting out of here. I got money and coffee and I'm going for a little drive."

"Where?"

"Don't know. California, maybe. Florida's warm."

"In that truck?"

"Sure, sure. A little drive. Ain't been to Florida in years." Poppy made a quick upward stroke that left a line an inch long. This was followed by three more strokes- creating the four sides of an uneven rectangle. He coughed pensively. "I didn't tell them. No pity for a old man, neither. No class, just a bunch of lowlifes."

"Who?"

Poppy made three X's in a row on the napkin. The rectangle looked catty-corner to the last X, but I was too far away to see it well.

"Who?" I repeated.

"Them boys who done this to me." He examined his drawing with simian curiosity, then folded the napkin in half. "Oh yeah." He unfolded it. "Almost forgot." He looked at Allison plaintively.

"Yes?" she said.

"See there." He stabbed at the box. "I want you to write this for Jay so he will know."

Colin Harrison

The Havana Room

"Sure. Where? Here?"

"Anywhere in there is fine!" He handed her the red lipstick. "First put C."

"Okay, C."

He rolled his head strangely, like he had water in his ear. "No, no, make it a K. It's a K!"

Allison made the correction.

"Then R, like ring-a-ding-a-bing."

"R, yes, okay."

He opened his eyes. "Then, uh, put O."

Allison caught my eye, her expression suggesting that we humor him. He seemed to be getting worse. "Okay, Poppy, you're doing very well. We have K, R, O. What's next?"

He shut his eyes again. "Put a W. Like whiskey woman. I knew a whiskey woman."

"That's it? KROW, like crow, the bird?"

"Now L-A," he insisted, eyes opening. "Just like the city."

"Pronounced la or lay?"

Poppy smiled at me malevolently. He seemed not just drunk but either crazy or brain-damaged. "I seen lawyers like you. I used to beat on guys like you."

"I'm sure you did." I leaned over to look at the napkin.

"Hey!" Poppy put his hand over it. "Take your eyeballs out of here, mister."

I leaned back. I'd see it later, I assumed. "That's it?" I asked. "The whole thing?"

"I said L-A, right?"

"KROW-lay? KROW-la?"

"Yes."

It sounded like the beginning of a Polish surname, something like Kowalski or Krawczyk, and I remembered that a number of Poles had settled in eastern Long Island in the early part of the twentieth century. Or maybe he had the spelling wrong and it was some other word, French perhaps. "What's it mean? Is it somebody's name?"