Elmore Leonard: Cuba Libre

"Maybe not asking so many bullets," Fuentes said, "but it happens, yes."

The soldiers were in every street, in groups or pairs, boys in blue-striped seersucker and straw hats with regimental badges, like tourists taking in the sights of the city. Many of these boys, Fuentes said, from Andalusia and the Canary Is lands. The somewhat older men in light gray uniforms were Guardia Civil. They stood about with thumbs hooked in their black leather belts waiting to be noticed, or daring you to look them in the face. That was the feeling Tyler got seeing them again on the street and remembering how they would ride into the mill looking for a fugitive-a man who might have committed only a minor crimemransack the workers' living quarters, chase down suspects and sympathizers and beat them. They threatened to shoot his dad one time, when he tried to keep them off the mill property.

They walked past a pair of Guardia posing on a street corner and Tyler said to Fuentes, "My dad called them barbarians, thugs, I forgot what else. What do you call them?"

"Usually," Fuentes said, "I call them sir. The Guardia are known for their loyalty, devotion to duty and lack of feelings. Imagine an insensitive brute having absolute power over people he considers his inferiors. Since they see themselves as infallible, I have no reason to antagonize them."

"I've been trying to figure out," Tyler said, "what side you're on, for Spanish rule or a free Cuba."

Fuentes grinned, his mahogany face shining in the lights of an open-air cafe. "And what side do you think?"

"The landowners, even Americans," Tyler said, "are for Spanish rule, happy with the way things are. If you're sitting on top, why change it? And since you work for one of the biggest landowners in Cuba…"

"Also a man of influence," Fuentes said. "It's in your best interest to agree with him." "Yes, if I want to be paid."

"Or at least appear to agree with him."

"So what side am I on?"

"I think you're for Cuba and to hell with Spain."

"If I tell you yes, you're right, would you believe me?"

Tyler hesitated. "Yeah, but I'd keep an eye on you."

"That's the way to be," Fuentes said. "Don't trust anyone. Or look around when I tell you we're being followed."

Tyler half-turned to look over his shoulder, then up at the decorative tiled facade of a building, at people in windows and doorways talking, girls in white dresses looking out at the street from behind grillwork.

"The first thing you do is what I tell you not to," Fuentes said. "It's all right. The one following is from the police; he wants to know if you are who you say you are. Maybe someone else is following, but I'm not sure, so don't worry about it."

They walked back to the hotel, Tyler in his new duds and carrying packages, shirts and underwear and his old hat he couldn't part with wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Everything else had been left at stores to be thrown away or offered to beggars. He kept touching his panama, not trusting the airy feel of it. When Fuentes told him he looked splendid, Tyler grinned. He liked Fuentes and liked Havana. The old part, la Habana Vieja, made him think of New Orleans: a look he remembered of shaded galleries and shutters closed against the heat, old government buildings and banana trees and broad esplanades, cannons, monuments. Havana had Morro Castle and La Cabafia fortress; New Orleans had Fort Pike on the Rigolets, Fort Jackson in Plaquemines Parish, another fort down on Grand Terre you could count. The narrow streets here were like streets in the Quarter, St. Philip, where they lived before moving to Terpsichore and he went to St. Simeon's Select on Annunciation, there two years when his mother and sisters took sick and died and he left to go west and work for a cattle outfit. The lobby of the Inglaterra, all lit up, could be the St. Charles and the dining room in there could be any number of restaurants in New Orleans, tile floor, white tablecloths, and mirrors on the walls. All kinds of things here reminded him of a hometown he'd been away from half his life. It was strange to feel at home here.

Fuentes gave the packages to a bellboy to put in Tyler's room. He took a breath and said, "All right, now I see about Mr. Boudreaux and come and get you when he's ready."

Tyler said fine and headed for the bar.

"I see you come in," Charlie Burke said, acting puzzled, "I was about to say to Neely, "Do I know that fella?" My Lord, stand there and let me look at you." Charlie Burke with his hat on, a cigar stuck in his jaw, enjoying his evening at the Inglaterra. Men at the next table, correspondents, looked over and Neely Tucker had a grin on his face.

He said to Tyler, "Join us, please," in his eager way, rising, pulling out a chair for him, then got the waiter to bring a rye whiskey with ice. Neely seemed anxious for people to like him, younger than the other correspondents and didn't seem full of himself like some Tyler had overheard, here and in the lobby, talking in loud voices to each other, ordering the help around, complaining to waiters, asking them where they'd been hiding. This bar, with its formal garden in the middle of the room, its gold statue of a woman flamenco dancer, was the correspondents' hangout. "Where rumors and fabrications are created to justify hotel bills," Neely had said, when they'd met in here earlier. "Some can stir up sentiment against Spain with mordant diatribes, recount eyewitness scenes of atrocity without leaving this room. That's not to say, you understand, atrocities aren't committed. Lots of them are, all the time."

Tyler had seen correspondents using their typewriting machines in here, smoking cigars, drinking, typing away.

On that earlier occasion Neely Tucker had said, "You don't remember, but we met one time before."

Tyler said no, he didn't recall, though he'd read enough of Neely's stories to feel like he knew him. The Chicago Times was the newspaper Dana Moon used to send him when he was at Yuma-editions of the paper, it turned out, Neely had sent Moon.

"We met in Sweetmary five years ago," Neely said, "when LaSalle Mining was trying to run those squatters off the mountain and Dana Moon stood up to the company and its gun thugs. It was in the Gold Dollar. All us correspondents were in there trying to decide what to call the situation, a war, a bloody feud, or what. Everyone felt we needed a catchy label, like the Rincon Mountain War was one, the Sweetmary War another. You were at the bar right next to me. You recall what you said?"

Tyler shook his head. "I must've been drinking."

"You said, quote, "You people come out here not knowing mesquite beans from goat shit and become the authority on whatever catches your eye."

"Yeah, I was drinking." Tyler nodded, thinking of the time. "But it didn't make what I said less true, did it?"

"Ben Tyler went to the tenth grade," Charlie Burke said. "He can be quite the authority his own self", sounding to Tyler like Charlie Burke was still smarting over the incident at the stock pens, missing the chance to sell a horse.

Neely was grinning again. He said, "I would have quoted your remark in a dispatch had it not been indelicate to do so."

"He was in a period of his life," Charlie Burke said, "where he made up his own rules of behavior. I thought he'd worked it out of his system busting rocks, but now I'm not so sure."

This was earlier in the evening.

Charlie Burke's mood had mellowed now with the rye whiskey. He said, "I saw you come in, I thought for a moment you were Richard Harding Davis, but Neely says he's over in France. I saw him a time before. There's a man knows how to dress."

"He knows how to write, too," Neely said. "Richard Harding Davis and this young fellow Stephen Crane. Their ability to produce a feeling of verisimilitude is scary. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage when he was only twenty four Have you read it?"