"Except some guys at the top."
" Exactly! Of course. The guys at the top, they get it all. They've sold everybody on this we-are-all-equal malarkey, but behind closed doors it's party time, with babes and drinks and fancy cars. But for nobody except the big shots. There's no give and take, only take by a few. Under the guise of something called equality. It's the greatest scam in the world."
"That is so wrong."
"It is wrong, Frankie. It's anti-American. This young Cuban man, he's a lawyer who doesn't practice, he just roams, giving speeches, collecting followers, making allegiances, looking for ways to advance his program, laying with a girl or two along the way. He's catnip to women. And, as you might imagine, he's exactly the one who'd benefit from the kind of chaos and instability as the day before yesterday."
"He's gotta be stopped."
"Frankie, suppose I tell you police snitches saw him in the house with Colorado the day before the assassination attempt. He's the thinker behind it. He's the brilliance figuring all this out. He gives the orders, and some other schmoes do the work and take the heat and maybe get burned."
"The bastard. He needs a bullet in the brain."
"You could do this?"
"Without blinking an eye. It's what I do best."
"That's my boy, Frankie. And that's where Captain Latavistada comes in."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. In Military Intelligence, it's his job to keep tabs on this kind of boy. On your own, without contacts, I think he'd prove too slippery. You'd never run him to earth. It's his town, Frankie, not yours. But Latavistada knows this stuff. He can help. You, him, I think you two could get along. Frankie, this is the job you were born to do. Can you concentrate on that and put the business of Bennie Siegel aside? It's called discipline and it's the hardest thing to learn. But I know you can do it, Frankie. I have my faith. There'll come a time when we call in the tab on Bennie's killer, but we've got this job to do, and you are the man to do it, right, Frankie? Then comes the business of the whorehouses and who's to take them over. And naturally it's you, Frankie, under my supervision and with the captain's assistance. You see, Frankie? Sometimes I think all this was planned out by someone with true vision. Are you ready for such a thing?"
"I am your man, Mr. Lansky," said Frankie, meaning it with every fiber of his being.
Chapter 26
The eagle soared. Its wingspan was immense, stretching for at least twelve feet, each feather immaculate and precise in the rigidity of the windswept moment. Its beak hooked downward sternly, its eyes were sagacious and farseeing as it observed the horizon for signs of danger, and it looked as if it were on freedom's patrol, ready to slide down and issue destruction from its razor-sharp talons at any indication of threat. It was, somehow, freedom itself. But it also wasn't; it wasn't going anywhere. It was made of brass, and it was tethered to a marble bridge between two marble pillars.
Earl stood below it, watching, supporting himself on a cane, trying to ignore the pain that a thousand aspirin had not mollified. He stood at the foot of some steps thirty feet beneath the ornamental bird, and behind him rushed the busy traffic of the Malecon. If he turned his head just a bit, over his right shoulder he could see the twin, gleaming towers of the Hotel Nacional, Havana's finest, atop a green hill, surrounded by green gardens.
"Do you know what this is, Earl?" asked Roger.
Weren't they supposed to be on the way to the airport? Wasn't there a 6:05 Air Cubana Constellation to New York, which would lead to a 10:15 to Saint Louis which would lead to a night in a hotel and an 8:30 A.M. to Little Rock, which would lead, by three tomorrow, back to Blue Eye, Arkansas, and a home, a wife, a child?
"Of course I know what it is," said Earl.
What remained of the USS Maine was this bird on these two pillars, two cannons embedded in the concrete base of the monument, and some brass words on a plaque, all of it facing empty sea under a hot sun. The ship itself had blown up some half mile out on that sea at this spot, but nothing out there indicated that it had ever existed.
"Do you know how many men died here, Earl?" said Frenchy.
"No. A hundred?"
"Three hundred sixty-two, in a flash. Bang, all gone, just like that."
"I get the point," said Earl. He glanced at his watch. "We have to be going. I have a flight."
"One more stop, Earl," said Roger. "No lectures, no chatter, no rah-rah from men you must think of as boys who haven't done one-tenth as much as you. But one more stop. It's just a bit of a way."
Roger signaled and the car came and got them, and Earl lumbered into the backseat with his hip throbbing away and now his head and shoulder also racked from the funny tension of walking with the damned cane.
"You let them give you anything for the pain?" asked Frenchy.
"I'm taking aspirin. I didn't want nothing stronger. You get used to feeling too happy. This ain't bad. Been through worse."
"I'll bet. The stories you could tell," said Roger.
"I don't tell stories, Mr. Evans."
"I know, Earl. It was just a figure of speech."
The car drove through Havana's busy traffic, where the cars all seemed to date from the thirties. The men wore straw boaters and linen suits and the women high heels and bare shoulders. Spanish in its most riotous form filled the air, and the sun slanted through palms and dust and beeps and squawks. Kids sold lottery numbers on the street, bananas, coffee, carvings and their sisters.
But then the car passed through gates, under the dark glade of well-nurtured and — tended trees, and up to a house that had once been a palace or at least a mansion. Earl saw the brass plaque next to the mahogany doors, and knew what he was in for.
They went up steps and of course the place was deserted. It was not a tourist hangout nor of much interest to the Cubans themselves. It spoke only of a kind of national vanity and the nation in question wasn't Cuba.
MUSEUM OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
They entered to church-like silence, and the presence of ghosts. Behind glass, manlike forms without faces stood in khaki uniforms, with hats upturned jauntily, speaking of vigor and mission and courage. They wore gold piping and puttees and carried bigflapped cavalry holsters crosswise on huge belts that were marked with cartridge loops.
Earl walked, with the aid of his cane, down the aisles, to more displays: medals, maps, a papier-mache model of a hill outside Santiago, with forces identified by tiny flags and color-coded: blue for American, red for Spanish. Cooking utensils, newspaper front pages, pocketknives, compasses, all un-dusty, under glass, which was dusty.
"See, Earl? There are other islands where Americans died. Iwo, Saipan, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, terrible islands. But there were other islands."
Saddles, well-worn and burnished, and other horse gear appropriate to a cavalry unit at the turn of the century. Boots and saddles. A beat-up old bugle. Quirts and whips. Spurs, jingly-jangly tack, saddlebags, rifle scabbards, all preserved under the dusty glass in the darkness, untouched for years.
"Here, Earl. This one should interest you."
The guns. Colt revolvers, single-action armies, six-shooters, Peacemakers, whatever you wanted to call them. They were familiar to him because his father had buckled one on every single day of his life, and Earl's job had been to clean it. He knew the old man was good with it, because in 1923 he'd shot it out in a Blue Eye bank with three wild brothers, and killed them all, and been a hero. Earl couldn't remember clearly, possibly because he didn't want to.