Elmore Leonard - Cuba Libre

He watched her turn to the young man behind the cigar counter.

"You know what I like, Tony, Sweet Caporals, por favor."

Neely struck a match and held it ready as she tore open the pack of cigarettes.

"Rollie sees me smoking in public he has a fit."

Neely watched her light the cigarette now, puffing away, her delicate little nostrils dilating, her pile of auburn hair shining in the lobby's electric lights.

"You do everything he tells you?"

"Just about. He's in there with his sugar buddies." "What're they up to now?" "The usual, making money."

"You must know Rollie's not your type."

"But I'm his, and that's what counts, isn't it?"

Neely and Amelia Brown were good friends from the moment they'd started talking early last fall and would meet whenever both were in Havana at the same time. Neely loved Amelia. He thought of her as the most adorable, the most unusual-bizarre, really-and intelligent girl he'd ever met in his life. Talking to her wasn't like talking to a girl. She knew things, what was going on in the world. You could say anything you wanted to her, even slip and use curse words and she never acted shocked. Hell, she used them herself. It rankled him a little that the time he spent with her didn't seem to bother Boudreaux. The way Amelia explained it, "Well, he knows I'm discreet, and he doesn't see you otherwise as a threat."

Neely said, "Why not?" Naturally a little hurt.

She said, "I don't know. Maybe if you were taller."

This evening he was curious to know what she thought of Ben Tyler.

"Did you meet the cowboy?"

"Ben? Yes, indeed."

"Rollie introduced you?" "Hardly. I spoke to him though." "Uh-oh."

"I have a new theory," Amelia said. "It isn't that Rollie gets jealous if he thinks I'm flirting… Well, he does, yeah. But he also likes to see people grovel, and if I acknowledge them, even by saying a few words, it raises their status so to speak, puts us all on the same level and then Rollie has trouble feeling superior."

Neely loved her theories.

"I've never seen you grovel." "No, that's why he respects me." Amelia paused as though she might explain this, but said, "You know what I mean."

She had always been candid with Neely about her role as Boudreaux's mistress, saying it was like a free lunch, she could have anything she wanted as long as it was Cuban. Amelia lived here year-round, on the sugar estate or at the summerhouse, on the beach not far from Matanzas. They'd met on a steamer, Amelia coming to Havana on holiday with her friend Lorraine… What Neely couldn't understand was why a girl from a respectable New Orleans family, good-looking, convent-educated, would ever consider being a kept woman. Amelia told him respectability was not an issue here, not with a mother who lived on cocaine toothache drops and KocaNola and a daddy who practically lived with his quadroon when he wasn't at the Cotton Exchange. She said, "I'm less kept than if I were married to Rollie; I can walk away any time I want." Neely said, "Are you sure?" Another time he said, "But you don't love him. Do you?" She said, "Rollie's fun." "Oh, come on."

"I mean fun to watch, the way nothing seems to bother him. And nothing does, because whatever he believes, he considers fact, and what he doesn't believe isn't worth talking about. He speaks, Neely, and no one questions or interrupts him. But is he confident because he's rich or because he's also kind of dumb, unaware? Would you ask him that, Neely?" He did try to interview the man one time.

"Mr. Boudreaux, sir, how can you sympathize with a regime that puts entire villages in concentration camps and is responsible for the annihilation of several hundred thousand innocent people?"

Boudreaux's answer: he asked Neely if he was aware of the raw sewage in the residential streets of Havana; if he realized there was no ordinance requiring a householder to empty his privy vault. "No, they use it until it overflows and then hire a night-scavenger to dip the filth into barrels. But then the honey wagon bumps along the street, the plugs in the underside of the barrels come out, and before the wagon's gone a block the street's full of raw sewage."

Amelia's interpretation: "He's saying this indicates the Cuban people are lazy and irresponsible, therefore harsh measures are sometimes required to govern them."

Neely tried another approach. "Mr. Boudreaux, you represent the main reason the United States could shortly be at war with Spain, and that is to protect American interests here in Cuba." It was meant as a question even though it didn't sound like one.

Boudreaux said, "Mr. Tucker," in that soft way he spoke, "if what you say is true and you were a soldier in the army of the United States, you think I would expect you to be willing to give your life for my personal interests?"

Amelia's comment: "You bet he would. Except Rollie wouldn't care who wins, Spain or us. Either way he'll still be sitting on top. Rollie's fear is the Cubans will end up running their own country, the Creoles and all those black people who used to be slaves. He knows they wouldn't put up with him."

Neely had interviewed people on both sides of the insurrection. Mlximo Gomez, the leader of the insurgents, the "Chocolate-colored, withered old man" the New York Herald said looked like an Egyptian mummy. During the two months Neely spent with Gomez's troops his camera, his razor and a pair of lace-up boots disappeared.

He had interviewed Calixto Garcia, the insurgent field commander with the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, put there years ago when he shot himself in an attempt to avoid capture. A Spanish surgeon saved his life and Garcia wore the wound stuffed with cotton.

He had interviewed a British military observer, a young subaltern named Churchill who had high praise for Cuban cigars but not much to say about the tactics of this war: "If the Cubans wish to convince the world that they have a real army, they must fight a real battle."

Neely had interviewed Spanish generals and naval officers. Most recently he'd interviewed Captain Sigsbee and survivors of the Maine disaster and had told Amelia about the marine at San Ambrosio who stared without moving or speaking, in total shock from the blast. He was arranging to have a chat with Clara Barton, here representing the American Red Cross on behalf of the reconcentrados. But the person he'd rather talk to than Bill McKinley or the queen regent of Spain was Amelia Brown.

She'd say, "Why? I'm not news."

No, but she had met just about everyone in Cuba who was and her air of insouciance talking about them was fascinating. He asked her, "What do you think of Fitz?"

General Fitzhugh Lee, American consul here in Havana, former Civil War hero and nephew of Robert E. "He's fat," Amelia said. "That's all?"

"He told me he thinks the Maine was blown up by a mine that was the work of a few, quote, 'malicious individuals." Interesting? Not unlike saying some naughty boys did it. He also believes that nearly every person born on this island is instilled with a dislike of the Spaniards and their methods. Even, he said, those born of Spanish parents."

Interesting.

Another one. What about the former captain-general, Weyler, known to one and all as "the Butcher"?

"He has rather soft blue eyes for a Spaniard."

"Really."

"He asked me to leave Rollie and go to Madrid with him. I thought about it-I've never been to Europe."

"Amelia, the man's a monster, the most bloodthirsty military leader in recent history."

"I didn't go, did I?"

Neely would tell her that one of these days she actually would become tired of Rollie and leave him. "Then what will you do?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"When you were a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

"I'm still a girl, Neely. I'm only twenty."