Dewey said, "Like she was using him."
Geis said quickly, "I wouldn't say that. I really wouldn't. It's just an impression I had, and I'm probably making too much of it. But you asked, and I really would like to cooperate-" He finished his pineapple juice; noticed our empty bottles, and began to search the pool area for a waiter. "-and I think Tomlinson would have said something if the girl was giving him a hard time. But he didn't. He described you, Doc. Told me to keep an eye out for you and to tell you he'd be in touch. 'A day or two,' he said. Not more than a couple of days."
"That's all?"
Geis was looking at Dewey, shaking his head slowly and starting to smile. "Well… there was something else. But I don't think he knew that you were bringing her along." Meaning Dewey.
"He wanted you to fix Doc up with a woman?" I couldn't tell if Dewey disapproved of the idea or just had a hard time believing it.
"No, what he said was, 'Tell Doc not to worry because-'" Geis stopped. "It's going to sound pretty weird."
"He's an old friend. I'm used to it."
"Okay-" He'd warned me. "-what he said was, 'Tell Doc not to worry because I've assigned an angel to protect him.' Something like that. 'He'll be traveling with an angel?' " Geis was trying to remember, amused by it. "It's hard to tell when he's joking, but he had this way of speaking like he was some kind of holy man. Or even God."
With that cross around his neck, Geis might be offended. So I didn't tell him that, lately, Tomlinson had been talking more and more like both.
10
Geis came by our room at seven to take us to dinner.
To join us, really, since I'd insisted on paying Tomlinson's loan and using the interest to pay the tab. I decided a night on the town wouldn't hurt. As Dewey had said, "Why sit around on our butts waiting?" Besides, I had the names that Armando Azcona and Juan Rivera had provided-Juan's secretary had offered a couple of other bits of information-and I wanted to look around Havana, see if I could decipher where and how to get in touch with the anti-Castro underground. Something to do, like an old hobby.
I opened the door to find Geis dressed in white dinner jacket and tropic worsted slacks, red hair brushed, mustache trimmed, shoes with a plastic shine. Smoking a cigar, too. One of the big ones wrapped hard with black leaves.
"Cohiba," he told me, moving it back and forth under his nose. "Couple of weeks ago, Fidel gave me one of his Trinidads to try. Next to that, this's the best cigar in the world."
Jesus, put a dinner jacket on the guy and he became a name-dropper. Having meetings with Fidel?
An hour earlier, I'd made it a point to strike up conver- sations with some of the hotel staff and managed to slip in questions about Lenny Geis. Yes, they said, he was a businessman from Canada. Yes, he'd spent every other month at Havana Libre for more than a year. Certainly-he was a nice man! And very important, judging from the government officials who sometimes came to dine with him.
Now, from across the room, Dewey took one look at Geis, hooted, and said, "Shit, Lenny, you didn't tell me we were going formal!" and hurried back to the bedroom to change. She came out a few minutes later wearing a gauzy, form-fitting black dress with silver buttons down the front that I'd not only never seen before but couldn't imagine her wearing. She saw the question forming in my eyes and answered in advance. Leaned to my ear to whisper: "Madrid, you big dufuss. Think I order all my clothes from Cabela's, like you? And I've got on those little jade underwear I told you about."
Finding Bets in bed with the French tennis star had been good for the Spanish fashion industry.
We walked seaward, then east along the Malecon. The evening had weight to it, warm and saturated with Gulf Stream air. A tropic night with stars above the silhouettes of stone garrisons and palms, while salsa music-it always sounded like an accordion player on a galloping horse- drifted through the streets.
Havana seemed healthier, more alive after dark… probably because decay is best revealed by sunlight.
The promenade was busy: bicycles, strollers, black-market hucksters, a few cars. Mostly Detroit's big-finned classics coming out of the shadows and showing themselves in the streetlights. Fifty-seven Chevys and Studebakers, a '49 Ford cruising beetle-like with its lavender taillights. They were something for Geis to talk about. Issue one of his nonstop monologues that seemed designed to purge loneliness rather than demonstrate what an expert he was on Cuba. At least the cars got him off the subject of prostitutes, who were hounding him, he said, making his life more difficult than it needed to be-he was so committed to the fiancee waiting for him in Montreal that he resented the temptation. "A lot of them, you can't help but notice are just plain gorgeous," he had said, "particularly some of the young mulattos. But I've got a good solid routine; I'm working. You won't catch me paying ten bucks to bring one up to my room!"
Now, walking beneath ficus trees, studying the traffic, he said, "These cars would be worth a mint back in the states. A forty-two Packard, you kidding? That old Buick? What'a you think that'd be worth? But they're just transportation to the habaneros. The only machines in the whole damn country that still work… use baling wire and Jeep tires to keep them running. Their gas ration is like ten gallons a month so they trade chickens, fish-you name it; their sisters-for a little extra gas so they can cruise the Malecon at night."
Dewey, who'd missed her run and wasn't in the best of moods, said, "I've got a new Corvette back home. Candy apple red." Not particularly interested. She was walking between Geis and me. Geis, with his short legs, was having a tough time keeping up.
Maybe to slow her, he said, "But your 'vette's not worth half what these cars are worth. Believe it. Couple years ago, the Cuban government was so tight for money they offered new Russian Ladas to the owners in trade. You know, polish up the classics and sell them for tens of thousands on the international collectors' market. But the habaneros didn't want that Russian garbage, so they started hiding their cars. The one Castro's people really want is a fifty-five Chrysler convertible." He looked at Dewey, then at me. Did we know why? I waited it out until he said, "Because it was Ernest Hemingway's car. White Chrysler two-door, red-leather upholstery. He lived just south of Havana, drove it to Cojimar every day to fish. Remember The Old Man and the Sea? Hemingway would drive around with the top down, figuring out the story in his head. But Castro's people never found the thing, so it's probably long gone. What'a you think a car like that'd be worth?" He was serious now, talking to me man to man. I waited until he said, "I figure the bidding would start at a couple hundred thousand, go up pretty quick to a million-five, maybe an even two. Remember what someone paid for Elvis's car a while back? Get some rich Japanese involved, yeah, I could see it happening."
When I said, "That's a lot to pay for a Chrysler," Geis's slow chuckle told Dewey that I didn't know anything about it. But when Dewey said, "Shit, with Hemingway alive and still in it, that's too much to pay," he let it go.
That showed me Dewey was having an impact on him, too.
He liked doing that. Liked pointing out bits and pieces of Havana, then calculating what they would be worth in Canada or the U.S. "Back in the world," he would say. Eating pork with lime and drinking mint mojitos at La Bode-guita-a cramped little restaurant where graffiti covered the walls-he said, "Frame some of the signatures, box up all the little signs and mementos, they'd bring thousands at an auction in New York. It's history," he said. "This little restaurant is so famous. Jane Fonda's name's on that far wall. She came to visit Fidel after sitting on that ack-ack gun in Hanoi, pretending to shoot down American planes. Hell, she'd of done it if she'd had the chance."