William Kennedy - Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

“Why are you sitting here talking to me when you could be with your diplomat or out looking for your fine and powerful king to patch things up?”

“I am fond of you. Instantly. Anoche. You have a manner. You seem to be different.”

“From your lovers?”

“Yes. I think so. You have a way. How you look at a woman. It is possible I could marry you some day, but it is too soon to know.”

“Your mother would kill you. Besides, you don’t want to get married, especially to three men. Or do you?”

“Marriage is exactly what I want.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed it.”

“I think you can be angry. You look angry with me. You looked at Hemingway in anger.”

“Mostly I’m angry with myself. Would you really like to have three lovers at the same time?”

“It is possible. Many women do it. Men have many women, some women have many men.”

“I only need one woman.”

“You are a rare man.”

“You are a rare woman to think I’m rare for needing only one.”

“Men are liars.”

“Women are greater liars and they are better at it than men. Do you want some more coffee?”

“I have to go back to work.”

“I’ll meet you later. We can go to dinner.”

“Maybe another night.”

“Am I on the way to being your third lover?”

“ Quizás. But not today. It is too confusing today.”

“I’m going to see your brother-in-law Max and ask if I can write for his newspaper.”

“He is very much in love with me but I don’t read his newspaper, which is for the tourists who do not need much news. But he is very intelligent and he seems to know everybody in Cuba. He talks literature with my friend Alejo Carpentier, he plays golf with Bing Crosby, and he has lunch with the gangster Trafficante.”

“Will you ask him to hire me?”

“He will hire you without my asking. He always needs writers. They come and go like gypsies.”

“Will you reconsider dinner with me tonight?”

“I think it’s not the best night.”

“Maybe it will turn out to be the best.”

“You are persistent, but I must go back.”

Quinn walked her into the museum and to an office where the guides gathered between tours. He was about to say he would come back to see her later in the day, but she saw something behind him and her face registered dark surprise. She walked away from Quinn and toward a man entering the museum. She stopped and talked into the man’s face, intimate talk. Then she shook her head. The man talked while she listened and she nodded yes. She looked around the museum to see if they were being watched, and they were. He put his arms around her and kissed her, held her, then went out the way he came. Renata saw that people had seen the kiss. How could they not? She came back to Quinn and said, “I cannot talk any more.”

“That was the lover who is the king?” Quinn said.

“Yes,” she said. Tears came to her eyes and she went into the office.

Quinn had been reading the Havana Post for a week, thinking its twelve pages did not leave much room for him, but maybe he’d make room. It was a brisk, pop sheet with Earl Wilson and Winchell, Blondie and Alley Oop, ship arrivals, an Anglo-American social calendar, headline stories from the AP, and whatever local, sports, and social news the rest of the space could handle. When Quinn entered the city room only four people were at work: a barrel-chested old man with white hair and brown skin reading galley proofs at a long table; a fine-featured brunette in her forties, alone on the rim of the copy desk editing wire copy; a tall black man who with two-fingered typing seemed to be translating a story from a Spanish-language newspaper; and Max Osborne, with open-collared shirt and tie, reading that same newspaper at his desk in a glass cubicle. Quinn crossed the room, tapped on Max’s glass and stood in his doorway.

“I asked Renata to urge you to hire me,” Quinn said, “but she said you’d hire me without her. Is that true?”

“Hemingway likes your writing, is that true?”

“He’s never seen a word of it. His praise of my novel was fiction.”

“We don’t publish fiction here.”

“I brought you some clips.” Quinn put an envelope on Max’s desk.

“Are you any good?”

“I’m uniquely talented. Read me.”

Max opened the envelope of clips, a few feature pieces Quinn had written for the Albany Times Union, and a dozen articles about Cubans for the Miami Herald , one on the two pro-Castro factions, one faction without money, one flush and probably CIA; also an interview with Carlos Prío, the president ousted by Batista’s 1952 coup. Prío fled to Miami with millions in public money, but denied to Quinn that he was spending it on guns for rebels to bring down Batista.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“ Suficiente . I can get along.”

“You talked to Prío.”

“I saw him handing out cash in his hotel suite. People were lined up in the hallway waiting to beg money to feed the family, or get out of debt, or bring a relative off the island, or hire on for the next invasion. His assistant had a stack of cash on a table and if Prío liked what he heard he’d say, ‘Give him an inch,’ and the assistant with his six-inch ruler would measure off a bit of the pile and send the beggar away with a smile.”

“I like your sentences,” Max said after skimming the clips. “I’ll hire you if you write something valuable.”

“About what?”

“That’s your problem.”

“I can do maybe two pieces a week. I’ve got a novel to write.”

“Two pieces will do if they’re good.”

“What about my press credentials?”

“You move fast.”

“Get your story in the first paragraph.”

“You’ll get a press card if I buy your story.”

“I may need a card to get the story.”

“I’ll give you a note.” And Max typed on a Post letterhead: “The bearer is a reporter on a three-day news assignment for this newspaper. Please grant him all normal courtesies.” He dated it and typed his name and signed it illegibly.

“Why are you in Havana?”

“It’s closer than Paris,” Quinn said. “I followed my nose, and it led here. I thought Miami would be exotic, but it’s pointless. Havana has a point. In Albany they merely steal elections. Here they put a pistol in the president’s ear while they show him the door.”

“I know Albany. It had very entertaining corruption, and it was wide open, like Havana. I went there on weekends with a classmate.”

“Albany’s corruption is still in bloom and its sin is eternal.”

“That’s comforting. You know Alex Fitzgibbon?”

“Everybody knows the Mayor.”

“We were at New Haven together. He comes here now and then.”

“Wait a minute. Were you at Alex’s house when Bing Crosby was there? Nineteen thirty-six?”

“I was.”

“So was I. I was a kid.”

“Sure. And your father got Bing a piano and he and Cody Mason sang ‘Shine.’”

“Right. My father now works for Alex in the court system.”

“And here you are, trying to work for me . Yale runs in your family.”

“I don’t work for you yet.”

“But you’re trying. My daughter, Gloria, goes to convent school in Albany.”

“If we talk long enough it’ll turn out we’re first cousins.”

“Coincidence isn’t all that coincidental. How do you know Hemingway?”

“I introduced myself last night. He ever behave like that before?”

“Not quite like that, but yes. That fellow he punched out called this morning and wants us to tell his story. But Hemingway’s not news when he punches somebody. If they arrest him, maybe, but now it’s a dogbite story.”