Tarp walked into the alley. The brick walls were windowless; there was one doorway that had been bricked in. The only place big enough to hide a man was a buttress to his right, but the space behind it was empty.
“The money?” Tarp said.
The young man reached behind his back as if he were going to get something from a pocket, and his hand came back with a knife.
“Stupid,” Tarp said. “You did think I am an imbecile.”
“Because you are an imbecile. This is Buena Ventura, not your farm, excrement head.”
Tarp put his back against a wall. The buttress stuck out to his left now, ten feet away, partly blocking the street. There was enough space for him to see a big man there now, however — a huge man, one of the biggest he had ever seen. He had a timber in one of his enormous hands, and he carried it easily like a baseball bat, although it was three inches on its side and four feet long.
“Uncle Tonio and me are going to teach you a lesson, farmer.”
Tarp waited for the big man to come into the alley. The young one was anxious, however. He moved close, flashing the knife back and forth in front of him, and Tarp broke his arm and flung him toward the rear of the alley. Then, as the huge man came toward him, he took out the .22 and pointed it at the basketball-sized face. “Drop the tree, Uncle Tonio,” he said. The man puffed. “I’ll shoot your eyes out first. Then your cojones.” The wood thudded on the filthy pavement.
Tarp gestured with the gun. “Both of you against that wall. Strip.”
“Naked?” Tonio was almost bald. He sounded as if he had emphysema.
“Naked.”
“Are you a queer?”
“No, I am a policeman.” He flipped out the green DGI card that he had taken from the dead man on the boat.
“Holy excrement,” Uncle Tonio groaned.
“Just so. Get the little man on his feet and start stripping.”
When the young man objected that he had a broken arm, the older one slapped him and told him to mind his manners. He muttered like a scold and called him a fool and told him to look at all the trouble he had caused.
“Naked?” he said again.
“Stark naked.”
His skin was like dirty bread dough, and it enveloped great circles of fat that fell in cascades over his chest and hips. The young man, on the other hand, was painfully skinny, and together the two of them made a very sad picture.
“Put your hands against the brick wall and spread your legs.”
“What for?”
“I want to see what you are hiding, what else?”
“Holy excrement.”
Tarp went through their clothes hurriedly. He knew enough about the Cuban criminals who had been exported to Florida to know that they worked in big gangs and they were ruthless-made so, he supposed, by a ruthless Cuban police. He found another knife, several thousand pesos, and, sewn into the big man’s jacket behind a pocket, a little bundle of identification cards, presumably from stolen wallets?
“You know the penalty for selling identification, Uncle Tonio?”
“I do not sell them. They are souvenirs. Of my relatives. Did I sell them? Did you see me sell them?”
“Do you know the penalty for hoarding identification cards?”
“There is a penalty for that?”
“There is a penalty for everything. You know that.”
“They are not mine, I swear! I bought that coat used. I did not even know they were there. Truly.”
Tarp pocketed the Cuban money and the cards and kicked the clothes down the alley. He dropped some francs from the waterproof pocket on the pile.
“We have our eye on you two. You have one chance. Cooperate with us, or it’s the People’s Court.”
“Sweet Jesu.”
“I will come back tomorrow. If you have said anything about what happened here, I will know you are enemies of the revolution, and I will arrest you on the spot. Understand?”
Uncle Tonio nodded. He elbowed the young man, who groaned. “It never happened.”
“What never happened?”
“Nothing never happened.”
Tarp shoved the pistol into his belt under the shirt and stepped carefully out of the alley. He crossed it quickly and turned a corner and went a block and turned again. Fifteen minutes later he found a street market where it was possible to buy used clothes without coupons, and he bought a dark suit and very shiny black plastic shoes and a white shirt and tie, and he put Buena Ventura behind him and found a public men’s room. It was clean and almost restful after the slum; he changed his clothes and stuffed the clothes from the boat into the trash can.
He went to a barber shop and had his hair cut, and before he could stop the barber he had been doused with sweet-smelling lotion that plastered his hair to his head like a cap. He hated the way he looked, but at least he did not look like himself. He went to a little park where children and dogs seemed to be running back and forth without stopping; there was a small Ferris wheel and a booth for throwing baseballs and a portable instant-picture place where he got two photos of himself. He found a secluded bench and ruined two of the ID cards separating the laminations, then managed to pry a third open and insert one of the photos and then seal it again crudely with the heat from a match from a packet he found on the pavement with “Support the sugar cutters in their drive for productivity!” on the cover. The card was not very convincing, but he judged it to be somewhat better than nothing.
He ate standing up at a cafe back from the main streets, leaning on a wood counter between a truck driver and a black merchant sailor who insisted on introducing themselves and being friendly. It turned out they thought he was a policeman.
“Do I look like a policeman?”
“You look like George Raft. Who but a policeman would want to look like that?”
He wiped some of the lotion out of his hair in another men’s room, but he still looked like a forties gangster.
At seven o’clock he began looking for the Plaza Marti, and he was there by twenty minutes after. He looked with real interest at the beautiful modern building that took up one side of the square and that was the Theatre of Revolutionary Culture. Somehow, a sense of human scale had been preserved despite its size. Three tiers of lighted windows were stretched like bright ribbons across its façade; inside, and outside on terraces with plain, waist-high railings, people were moving, looking at this distance like colored chips swaying on the ribbons. In the vast plaza itself, couples moved in a clockwise whirl with the slow and graceful gait of flirtatiousness. In a larger circle, bicycles moved around them, with one or two now darting through the crowd; at the outer edge, scooters and a few cars moved almost hesitantly, like animals that have wandered into an alien environment.
He crossed the square against the swirl of moving people. Many of the men looked as he did, slicked-down and suited, so he supposed that they were all policemen or else his two informants had been wrong. Then again, nobody else was wearing a white tie on a white shirt with a black suit. The women looked overdressed to him and too extravagantly made up. They affected dark lipsticks and towering hair and stiletto heels. Despite the revolution, it still looked as if Havana were the Las Vegas of the Caribbean.
Juana Marino found him in the crowd. He was looking the other way when he heard her rich voice say, “You have been to a Havana barber!” and she was giggling. She had spoken Russian, which helped to remind him that he was supposed to be a Russian named Yegor Solkov and not a French journalist named Selous (as it said on the packet of documents he had in a pocket), nor a Cuban named Ibazza (as it said on the doctored ID card in another pocket), or even an American named Tarp. “You smell like a Cuban,” she said.