Markson nodded, obviously rattled by the complexity of the story; but he’d get it when he read it.
“I need the riot,” he said, and he went back to the city desk.
Quinn considered whether he should include his own role in snatching the rifle from Tremont and handing it, along with Tremont, to Doc Fahey for safekeeping. But he decided it would intrude on Tremont’s AR-15 salute that rescued Fahey and his partner from razors, knives, blackjacks, and shotguns in the hands of black and white rioters, who were all converging on the cops as primal enemies. This was not your ordinary race riot, but a spontaneous exercise in anarchy, the aim being not reciprocal death among racial antagonists but multicolored and miscegenational chaos. And the rescue would soon be seen by Tremont’s peers as seriously ironic: Tremont suddenly the guardian angel of Albany cops, who are famous for brutalizing street demons like himself, and who knows how many other blacks who were caught up in the riot.
For Quinn it was the second time in his life he had taken a weapon from a shooter, the first being from Hemingway in the Cooney duel. But you are not the story, Mr. Quinn. And he decided there was no way to tell that tale, which would emerge somewhere in its own good time.
Quinn was on page three of Tremont’s odyssey when Markson came back and peered over his shoulder, picked up the two finished pages, and said, I’ll take this too, and pulled the third page out of Quinn’s Underwood, went back to the city desk and sat and perused it all without a pencil, then came back to Quinn.
“This is great stuff,” Markson said, “but don’t write any more. We’re not doing anything with your friendly assassin.”
“He’s not an assassin,” Quinn said.
“Good for him, but whether he is or isn’t it doesn’t run tonight. Not one word about Tremont. Upstairs doesn’t want it, doesn’t think it’s true.”
“Every word I write will be true and provably true.”
“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 f
ix 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.
“You know this cemetery?” Hemingway asked.
Quinn was alone in the backseat of the Chrysler station wagon, Hemingway in the passenger seat beside his driver, Juan, who came for him after the Cooney knockout. He would be Hemingway’s second.
“All I know is that it’s a spectacular place,” Quinn said.
“It’s where they put all the famosos,” Hemingway said. “There’s also thousands of Cubans the Spaniards starved to death back in ’98, and your grandfather’s pal Máximo Gómez is buried here.”
“Why do Cubans fight their duels in a cemetery?”
“It gets you in the mood for death. And it’s handy for the loser.”
“Cooney’s got two seconds that he flew in from Miami.”
“He can have twenty. All I need is Juan to carry the pistols. I’ve got a pair of .38 revolvers I brought back from France. Cooney wanted .38s. He can use one of mine, either one.”
“You think he’d use one of your pistols?”
“He can test it in advance if he doesn’t trust me. Juan has extra cartridges.”
“I didn’t talk about that with Cooney. We assumed you’d each have your own.”
“That’s all right. I’m not fussy.”
“You’re pretty calm about this.”
“If you get excited your aim goes bad. Cooney agreed on you being the referee, right?”
“He did. What does a referee do?”
“You’ll have to imagine that for yourself, just like chapter six. By tradition we start back-to-back. Pace off to the count of ten, then turn and shoot. You do the counting, then duck behind the nearest tombstone.”
“This is absurd,” Quinn said, “absolutely nuts, you putting your life on the line. You’re like goddamn Mount Rushmore and here you are diddling with some Baltimore salesman. I can’t believe you’re going through with it and I can’t believe I’m part of it.”
“It’ll work out,” Hemingway said.
“How?”
“You’ll see.”
“Bullets are bullets.”
“You’re right about that.”
“If you kill him that’s the end of you.”
“I’ll try not to kill him.”
“He could kill you.”
“He could, and some would say I deserved it, that I violated his honor.”
“If he kills you you won’t finish your book.”
“That’s the real tragedy. I’ve got four books to finish.”
“You shouldn’t do this. Why not apologize and get it over with?”
“Never apologize, never explain, John Wayne.”
“Every duel Wayne ever fought they used blanks,” Quinn said. “Juan, what do you think? Qué piensa?”
“Papa sabe,” Juan said, not taking his eyes from the road. “He know.”
“What does he know?”
“Lo sabe todo. Everyting.”
“If you die my career is ruined,” Quinn said. “I’ll be the one who let you do this.”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
“That won’t matter. I’ll be the goat, the man who let Papa die, the man who set up the duel. I’ll be like Ralph Branca throwing that fastball to Bobby Thomson. How will it look on my résumé?”
“A writer doesn’t need a résumé.”
“Are you really ready to die?”
“Always.”
When Hemingway blew off the top of his head with a shotgun Quinn felt he’d been cut off in the middle of a sentence that was going to explain an unknown that had obsessed him since he decided to become a writer. He hadn’t seen the man in four years and his death was a shock that lasted for days. The key to the unknown might now be lost forever. Hemingway knew where it was. He had gone there and held it in his hand and came back to write and prove he had found it. If Quinn could find that place maybe he’d be able to figure out how to write what had to be written; but he wasn’t anywhere near there yet, and with Hemingway gone the solution seemed very far off.
Wait a minute—only Hemingway had the key?
Others had it, but I knew him and could talk to him.
He couldn’t have told you any secrets. He had four books going and couldn’t finish any of them. He was fading. You met him too late.
He could still talk, even if his ambition outdistanced what was left of his talent. He found the answer early on and kept telling us what it was, but he never got it all out. It was his iceberg principle: only the tip revealed, the rest stuck in his throat.
On the street at the Romanesque Arch a new Chevrolet sedan was idling, the Cooney early birds, and a uniformed guard sat behind the wheel of another car. Juan got out and spoke with the guard and shook his hand, then went to the Cooney car and spoke to the driver. The guard opened the gate for the two vehicles and Juan got back into the car and led the way to the south section of the cemetery, a large open field of mown grass. The six participants got out of their cars. Hemingway wore a white guayabera and black trousers and black dress shoes, a dress-up occasion for him. In the new morning light Quinn could see an animation in his face akin to what it was like while Cooney was singing about slivers.
“Where’s the doctor?” Quinn asked him.
“We won’t need a doctor.”
“There should be a doctor.”
“It’ll work out,” Hemingway said.
Cooney had a small hat on, a modified Panama he’d cut into a tight brimless skullcap that covered his bandage. His lower lip quivered a bit, and why not? His friends wore pale orange Hawaiian shirts with muscles in them and they held guns in their hands, one each. They weren’t ugly or grotesque, not American Gothic, but there was menace in their haircuts. Cooney was wearing a seersucker sport coat and made a point of taking it off and tossing it on the ground as he got out of the car. He walked toward Hemingway with an earned purpose that had brought about this moment, this confrontation of a little ol’ Baltimore pissant with the greatest fucking writer of the century, and that’s America for you, except this is Cuba. But Cooney knew time, God, fervency, and the pursuit of happiness were on his side. He was facing down the smile of a man of unknown dimension. Hi
s new knowledge of Hemingway could not really encompass what the writer stood for in American history or the literary canon or even café society, and he couldn’t possibly know what this endeavor of his would lead to—a fiasco, a disaster, a tragedy, a burlesque, a fantasy, a dream, a populist manifesto, a personification of democratic eventuation? Whatever it might be it certainly was like nothing he’d ever experienced, and he was still taking his second step toward Hemingway when he decided to spit—to the left—and Hemingway noted this without comment—and Cooney wondered if there would come a moment in which he would find a new lyric for a song that was apt for this instant—this confrontation between the nobody and the somebody who doesn’t yet know I’m one hell of a shot, I can untie your shoes at fifty feet, old buddy. You’re nobody till somebody shoots you. But get on with it Cooney, never mind this nonsense. Move ahead and spit in his eye. No, don’t. He don’t rate that. He showed up. He’s some sumbitch, no doubt about it, to come and see this out with me. I’m gonna be all right. I got the best guns they are and he probably does too, but that don’t matter. Go for it, bud, say what you gotta say.
“You punched me for no reason,” he said.
“I had a reason,” Hemingway said.
“What was it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“That ain’t a reason.”
“Wasn’t much of a reason, whatever it was. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember it.”
“I never done one damn thing to you.”
“That’s right, you didn’t. Maybe something in you, or in that song you sang, rubbed me wrong. A lot of things in this world rub me wrong.”
“And you punch ’em all out, do you?”
“I punch out some.”
“Some of ’em punch back, I expect.”
“You did.”
“You can’t say why you give me a sucker punch.”
“I was pissed off. I don’t know at what. You were a handy way of letting off steam.”