Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Chester pulled the Chevy to the curb, cut the motor, and turned the volume way up. “You know what this is?” I shrugged, already afraid Chester was about to do something show-offy. He lunged out of the car and began to dance, his alligators flashing on the asphalt. “Cuban mambo,” he cried, pressing his right palm to his belly, showing me the source of the music, and how it streams downward through your hips and legs into your feet. He danced as if he had a woman in his arms, or the music itself was a magnificent woman, like Abbe Lane or Rita Hayworth, with mammalian heat and substance, as required by the era. Chester’s every motion displayed her with formal yet fiery adoration. His spine was straight, shoulders level, and his head aristocratically erect, the posture of flamenco dancers, but the way he moved was more fluid and had different hesitations. “This is Cuba, baby. Ritmo caliente.” He looked very macho. I could see why girls liked him.

I envied his talent and succumbed to his love of this music and dancing, in which I saw the shadow of Uncle Zev, greater dancer and friend of gangsters, who moved in a greater life, far away in the elegant casinos of Havana, where beautiful women and dangerous men took their nightly pleasure. I began yearning to go to Cuba, but over thirty years would pass before I had the chance. America was almost continuously at war or on the verge of war, and there was the revolution in Cuba. Then, in 1987, I was invited to a film festival in Havana. I’d be in the American contingent, which included film directors, screenwriters, photographers, and journalists.

The night before I left, I received a phone call from Uncle Zev, who for the past twenty years had lived in Brooklyn with his wife, Frances, my mother’s sister. I lived in Berkeley.

“You’re going to Havana.”

“How did you know?”

“I know.”

In this way, with his old-fashioned gangsterish manner, he intimidated me.

“I need a favor,” he said.

“Of course. Anything.”

“There’s a woman in Havana. Consuelo Delacruz. I am saying this once, which is already too much, so listen. Go to Consuelo. Identify yourself. Get down on your knees. Then say …”

“I think you said get down on my knees.”

“Say that your Uncle Zev continues to worship the ground she walks. Say he kisses her feet. Get a pencil and paper and I’ll tell you how to say it in Spanish.”

“I already feel guilty. Chester and I used to be close. We went to high school together.”

“Chester is in the construction business. A Manhattan contractor. Last month was very bad. He made two hundred fifty thousand. You think he gives a shit about human feelings? I’m telling you about undying love in the heart of an old man. Are you a sensitive writer or what?”

“Should I kiss her feet, assuming I find her?”

“She works at the Tropicana. I’ll fill in the background. Listen.”

In a few minutes he’d told me a long story …

Zev worked in Havana from the late forties to the mid-sixties. When Fidel made his triumphant progress through the streets, with Che Guevara and Celia Sánchez, a doctor and the daughter of a doctor, Zev stood in the delirious crowds, trying to figure out what to do with his life. Not political, he was indifferent to the revolution, except that it cost him his job, but he was madly in love with Consuelo Delacruz, who refused to leave Cuba with him. To struggle with English, in a Brooklyn grocery store, would be an insufferable humiliation. Besides, Zev was married.

He lingered in Havana, doing this and that, and didn’t leave until obliged to do so by the revolutionary government. In 1966, the Ministry of Economics unearthed ledgers in the Hotel Capri, where George Raft once had the penthouse suite, and discovered Zev’s initials beside certain figures, again and again, right up to New Year’s Eve, 1959, suggesting that he had been in possession of great sums of gambling money, not only from the Capri, but from the Nacional and Tropicana, too. The revolution wanted it. He showed them a receipt, the same he’d shown the mob, proving he’d turned over the money to Batista before his flight to the Dominican Republic. In a fit of moral disgust, Fidel personally ordered Zev’s expulsion. He said, “I wanted only to burn the money in your face.”

Zev had been a runner between the casinos and Batista’s officers. On the night Batista fled, Zev rushed with conga drums on his shoulders down O’Reilly Street to the docks and then into a receiving shed. Two soldiers emerged from behind crates, took the drums, which contained over a million dollars, and gave Zev a photo of Batista. This was the receipt. Across the eyes of the photo, Batista always signed his mother’s name. The photo was signed, but across the mouth, not the eyes. Zev understood that the soldiers, whom he’d never seen before, intended to hand the money over to the revolution and thereby escape Fidel’s tribunals and the firing squad. Neither here nor there, as far as Zev was concerned. He had to present the authentic receipt to parties who also had firing squads. Zev laughed. “I see it’s over with Batista, eh, amigos ?” The soldiers laughed, too, and Zev broke the neck of one with a forearm blow and disemboweled the other with a knife even as their laughter resonated in the shed. Searching their uniform pockets, he found the authentic receipt. He spent that night with Consuelo, in her apartment, brooding.

“Return the money, or give it to the revolution.”

“The soldiers are in a crate at the bottom of the harbor. I have the receipt. The money is for you and the child.”

“Nobody will need money anymore. What child do you mean?”

Now, 1987, considering the economic misfortunes of the revolution, Zev figured Consuelo would be glad to have the money, but he wanted her to come to the States. I was to explain this to Consuelo, reading from the Spanish dictated to me by Zev over the phone. She knew about the money. She didn’t know what Zev had done with it.

That night in Havana, twenty-eight years ago, lying in the arms of Consuelo, Zev made a plan — to be put into effect only if he continued to love Consuelo. “I am a realistic person. Feelings die,” he said. Seven years later, a few weeks before Zev was deported, his child was born. He was still in love with Consuelo.

From the pattern of whorls in the tiny thumbprint, Zev worked out a formula. It translated into a graph. This graph described the proportionate distance between peaks and valleys along the shaft of a key that opened a bank box in Zurich. The original key was destroyed. To reconstruct it, Zev’s child — now twenty-one years old — had to supply the thumbprint. That’s how Zev planned it in 1959. Only one person in the world, his Cuban love child, could lay hands on the money. Zev had waited seven years in Cuba and loved Consuelo. He’d waited over twenty years away from her. He loved her no less. The old man cried himself to sleep at night.

On December 22, at 10:00 p.m. I walked into the Tropicana and began looking for Consuelo Delacruz to tell her that she and the child were rich in dollars and the undying love of my uncle Zev Lurie. I imagined he was at that moment huddled in a heavy wool coat, his face bent against the blades of winter, hustling through freezing New York streets from his office to his limousine. My heart went out to him. I was delivering warmth to the lonely winter of his life and I was glad. He’d confessed to me. I felt honored, grateful. I valued his intimacy.

I passed through an entranceway of pointed arches, then a lobby, and entered the largest outdoor nightclub in the world. Tiers of white tablecloths, in a great sweep of concentric circles, descended toward a vast curved stage. There were trees all about, tall palms and flamboyants, the towering walls of a natural cathedral open to the nighttime sky. I went to a table near the edge of the stage. A waiter approached. I pulled out my notebook and asked, “Dónde puedo encontrar Consuelo Delacruz?”