“Not tonight,” and he dropped the three pages on Quinn’s desk.
Quinn retreated, silent, and he pulled page four out of his typewriter. The back of his chair rocked and so he rocked himself. He folded the pages and put them and his notebook in his sport coat pocket. He went to the city desk and asked Markson, “Do you want a riot story?”
“I can take a few paragraphs. Eddie Fennell is writing about the roundup of blacks. They arrested eight or nine.”
“No whites?”
“There’s four in the hospital. Three blacks in there too.”
Quinn went back to his desk and without notes wrote five paragraphs on the Molotovs and the white raiders, and the blacks tipping the car. He put the story in Markson’s in-basket.
Markson looked up at him, an apology in his eyes. “If we don’t write about the assassination plot,” he said, “then it never existed and they have nothing to charge your man with. They’ll let him go.”
“Let him go?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Is the Mayor calling these shots?”
“Who else could?”
“But our publisher is going along with it.”
“Take a guess.”
“I’d guess that my day is done,” he said. “And to fill the silence where my story was supposed to be I’m going to go listen to a little jazz.”
“You’ll find a way to put Tremont on the page one of these days.”
Quinn decided he was again a failed witness to history, Tremont’s story as lost as Fidel’s, for history conspired against both stories. The medium — that so-called first draft of history — proved to be not the message but the anti-message. Quinn, always aware of these limitations, had finally decided he was furious with himself for believing he could work beneath the strictures, write what would not be countermanded, reveal history in language graceful but hip, simple but sly, exfoliating with the essential stories he had tracked down and wanted to tell to the world. Right.
How now to tell the story of becoming an obsolete white man, obsolete creole? Matt had the same story to tell, and Claudia’s was similar. Black Power was confounding racial identity to the point that the FBI had become black, the media were in conspiracy against blacks and whites alike, and witnesses like Quinn were irrelevant. Markson was right about Quinn putting Tremont on the page, but it would take Quinn forty years to do it — in a novel, where he would also write Hemingway’s duel and Renata’s disappearance into a silence nobody could cut.
When she disappeared from the Holtz estate Quinn worked day and night in Santiago and Havana to find her, pursuing her trail to one dead end after another. No one in her family, none of the Directorio people Holtz put him in contact with, none of her friends at the museum, had heard a word from or about her. They found her car parked a block from the hotel in Santiago. Quinn drove it back to Havana but Esme told him to keep it until they found Renata. He researched her haunts, the Biltmore Yacht Club, the Country Club, the museum, which was closed and under repair from bullets and shelling, the cafés near the University (which Batista had closed, interrupting Renata’s education). He went to the Ali Bar she said she loved and other of the night cafés where she grew up under Esme’s eye, but he had no faith he’d find her in such places. She wouldn’t have left him to cruise Havana’s night world. He picked Max’s brain, Esme’s, her mother’s, he found artists she’d talked about, but nothing. The police mocked him as a bridegroom left at the altar.
He awoke in his apartment in Havana on the fourth day after her disappearance and stopped his search, bereft of new ideas, and he began writing his interview with Fidel. He could not think clearly, and failed to convince his ex-editor at the Miami Herald, Henry McMullen, that a profile based on Fidel’s intellectual views of revolution was the salient element of the story. Matthews already did that, McMullen said. Not the way I’m doing it, said Quinn. Then work it into the body of the story but we need a hard news dimension to justify it, said McMullen. You don’t think the fact that he’s alive is hard news, said Quinn, or that after we ended our talk he marched all day and half the night and captured El Uvero — how hard does it have to get? We did El Uvero yesterday in six paragraphs, McMullen said, what else have you got? I quit smoking last year but I smoked a cigar with Fidel, Quinn said. How great does it get? Very great, McMullen said. We’ll put it on the comics page.
So Quinn wrote it the way he wanted to write it, giving a nod to the El Uvero raid, the bloodiest battle so far in the war, a great success for the rebels, and he used as his lead Fidel’s farewell line that “I have an appointment with President Batista’s armed forces.” He drew a picture of a leader whose mother thinks he was born as a warrior god, his birth witnessed by Changó the Orisha. Nobody will know who Changó is. Let them find out. He wrote that Fidel had been born into the era where he belonged, a man who found his hour, as Faulkner put it. A hero is born, not made, right? Does Quinn really think that? Probably not. If McMullen doesn’t use the story he’ll give it to the AP or The Washington Post, somewhere there’s an editor who values Fidel’s personal take on his miraculous survival. Just write it.
While he was writing, Hemingway called.
“I got another letter from Cooney,” Hemingway said. “Same stuff, a little more urgency. I decided I’d meet him. Pistols. Since you’ve been central in all this I want you to set it up and be the referee. Cooney trusts you. I’ll also bring a second. We’ll do it tomorrow, if he’s not chicken. We’ll meet at Colón Cemetery at dawn, that’s how it’s done down here. Six-thirty-two is sunrise. I’ll pick you up at six. Meet at the main gate. I’ll have to pay off one of the guards to let us in. The cemetery doesn’t open till nine. Where do you live? And no press, not even you.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I saw the whites of his eyes. Are you on?”
“I’m on. My wife disappeared but I’m on. Three days and I can’t find her. I told Fidel about your duel. He thinks you have to do it, even though you’re too valuable to take such a risk. If you can hold off till he wins the revolution he’ll fix it so you win, but if not, then you should find a way not to lose because you’re too valuable to die. He said he had For Whom the Bell Tolls with him in the Sierra and it taught him things about battle.”
“Always glad to help a worthy cause. But I’ll fight my own battles, without a fix.”
“Is Cooney still at the Hotel Regis?”
“His letter was on their stationery.”
“You’ll need a doctor in case somebody gets shot. You think anybody will?”
“I’d bet against it,” Hemingway said.
“You know a doctor who’ll come?”
“Yes. What about your wife?”
“When I came back after Fidel she was gone. She must’ve been taken by the police or the SIM.”
“What did she do?”
“She was close to one of the Palace attackers.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I know.”
“Then you don’t need this duel in your life.”
“I have no direction to go in right now, nowhere to look. I’ll do it.”
“You married her. How did that happen so fast?”
“I was always told to get my story in the first paragraph.”
They would meet Cooney at the great Romanesque Arch that was the northern gate of Colón Cemetery, and then go to the southern section of the cemetery, which Hemingway had said was the least populated, with ample room for a bullet to fly toward the horizon and lose its momentum after a hundred or a few hundred yards without hitting anything but a tree. The place looked like a dwarf city, sidewalks and sculpted trees, a hundred and forty acres, so many mausoleums, family chapels, crypts, magnificent marble structures (the Firemen’s Monument, which honors twenty-seven who died in 1890, looked about six stories tall), statues, domes, obelisks, an Egyptian pyramid, a Pietà, an hourglass with wings, a world of kitsch, a world of art.