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

Renata came into the parlor bearing solace, two rums on the rocks, extra ice, and the bottle of Bacardi dark from Puerto Rico, where the distillery had relocated after Fidel won the war. Quinn watched her move and saw in her all the elements he had always loved; also saw another creature with no resemblance to the original: a chameleon, duplicitous, schizoid. But you bought into it, Quinn. Yes, but how could I have understood such shape-shifting when I was under the influence of the simple declarative sentence? The simple declarative sentence is an illusion.

“Did I put too much water?”

“Not at all,” said Quinn, tasting.

“What’s the mail?”

“I have a useless book tour ahead of me, and George has been fired.”

“Why?”

“Why is the book tour useless or why George?”

“George.”

“He’s overdue at the office and he can’t think or function or even find the Court House without a guide. It was inevitable. They’ve been kind to George even though they think they’re punishing me by firing him. We lose his $34.50. How can we possibly live without it?”

“They did the same thing to Matt’s father.”

“You are perspicacious. We hurt them, they hurt us. I decided to write a novel about it.”

“About George being fired?”

“About him, Matt and Martin, Tremont, Roy, Zuki, you, me, the Mayor, Gloria and Max, and on it goes. No end to the cast of characters.”

“Do you want a refill?”

“The last time I refused a drink. Did you hear Martin and Pop talking about World War One tonight?”

“Bits.”

“Pop always told World War stories, also his father’s stories — from the Civil War, and riding with the ragtag Fenians, and with those ex-slaves fighting Spaniards in Cuba. But he was only eight when his father died, and he never sorted out the specifics of any of those wars.”

“So your new novel is about George?”

“More about you than George.”

“I’m not worth a novel.”

“You’re worth two or three novels. I have to put Tremont in it too. He’s worth two or three novels. If I wrote your story would you be afraid of it?”

“You don’t know my story.”

“I know quite a lot.”

“I’m not afraid of what you know.”

“You should be.”

“Your own imagination is all you know.”

“It is a novel, after all. I’d have to write about our reunion at the Fontainebleau, that lovely mobbed-up luxury.”

“That was Alfie. Max asked him about a hotel on the Beach and Alfie made a call to one of his friends.”

“I knew that. Alfie also set up your flight out of Havana — your cousin Holtz again to the rescue. But back then I knew nothing about what was going on.”

But when Quinn walked into the suite at the Fontainebleau, he knew everything. He called the front desk and asked for another suite; can’t have your honeymoon on somebody else’s hot mattress. Max had abdicated and Renata was now a bleached blonde (under that occasional blond wig), free of Batista and Robles, and reunited with this new arrival, the husband Quinn, but unable to hear anything he said. She stepped into her bridal lingerie, crotchless, and from the moment they touched in the new bed she delivered every element of passion in her repertoire, spoke to him in the language of love she had been learning since puberty, and convinced him that he was all there was in the world for her, that they’d be together forever, nothing could separate them, she would die before leaving him, and yes, he felt blessed in reclaiming her, possessing her in their new bed was a union beyond loving — it was consummation.

And, yes, they would continue forever, beginning here and into a second day, sixteen hours of love and food and sleep and rum and more love. He would repeat in memory every phone call to airlines, police, hospitals, friends, the investigation that failed. But Max hadn’t failed. He’d found her through a Brazilian diplomat and launched the rescue without calling Quinn or Renata’s family (who knew where she was and told no one — out of fear for her). Quinn had actually called the Brazilian embassy and two dozen others: My wife is lost, are you giving her asylum? No, señor , call the police. Max sent her an exit package: foofy blond wig, white dress, white heels, white sunglasses (did Max know how partial the adepts of Santeria were to white clothing?) and told her to wear them tomorrow. He arrived at the embassy with Alfie’s friend Inez, who was wearing the same wig, white dress, heels, and shades, and ten minutes later Max left the embassy with Renata, the white simulacrum, while Inez changed into black for her departure.

“It may be I’ve been seducing Max since I met him, my dress too low with that young cleavage. I can’t blame him for coming at me if I did that, but I don’t love him, I repeat, I do not love Max . He’s gone to Cuba forever and we have his money and I don’t want his love. I’m sorry it wasn’t you who rescued me from villains, Daniel. I’m sorry.”

Quinn mixed a second nightcap for himself and Renata. She exuded calm, poise, a notable achievement in restoration after the Albany Garage, where they had gone at each other in a bout of brief, savage, self-vindicating sex and ended breathless, sweating, and temporarily purged.

“When did you first think about leaving me?”

“I got bored, Daniel.”

“I asked you when not why.”

“You were bored too. El ladrón juzga por su condición. Takes one to know one. We had never talked about ending it.”

“Easy. You pack your lingerie and go. I keep the house, you take the nine hundred thousand.”

“But that was yesterday. Today we have a second chance.”

“What happened today?”

“I decided you were behaving like an Orisha.”

“Changó?”

“Something like that. Subverting things. Throwing bombshells.”

“Who, me? I’m a reporter.”

“Matt said you were writing a bombshell tonight. And you wrote one about him yesterday.”

“I was doing a serious, far-out story on Tremont, but they wouldn’t print it.”

“That was the assassination plot, no? Matt told us.”

“The editors said they didn’t believe it, but really they were afraid of it.”

“Then that was a Changó story.”

“If so then Tremont was Changó. He was the one with the thunderbolts. I watched it happen and took some notes I can’t use. I’ll have to put them in the new novel.”

“Then it will be a Changó novel.”

Quinn saw new activity on the television screen and he turned up the volume. Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press secretary, spoke into a microphone: “Senator Robert F. Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife, Ethel, his sisters Mrs. Stephen Smith and Mrs. Patricia Lawford, his brother-in-law Mr. Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was forty-two years old.”

Mankiewicz stepped away from the microphone.

The phone rang. Quinn looked at Renata who did not move. He answered in the dining room and Renata turned down the TV.

“Dan?”

“Doc.”

“Your niece Gloria’s in the burn unit at Albany Hospital, so is Roy Mason. Very bad fire.”

“Wait a minute, Doc.” Quinn gestured with the phone for Renata to listen. She stood beside him. “Go on, Doc. Gloria and Roy you were saying.”

“They were in Roy’s apartment on Van Woert Street. The whole house is gone. Man on the third floor died, firemen couldn’t get inside to save him. His room didn’t have any windows. Joe Crowley told me heavy flames were already going up the front and back stairs when they got there, and the Engine Two firehouse is only three and a half blocks away. Gloria and Roy went out a second-floor window with blankets, and the fall hurt them both. Dan?”