Scarface by Paul Monette Read Free Book Online Page A

week, till he started to fight with the drunks and pimps and hollered at the guards. He finally thought he’d got somewhere when a fleshy man in a self-important suit came swaggering down the hall and let him out. Tony began to complain about his rights, and the man cuffed his ear and sent him sprawling. “Shut up, Tony Montana,” he sneered. “You got a one-way ticket to Havana, compliments of the French government. Save your breath for Castro.”
    All the way back in the plane, Tony kept revolving it over and over in his mind. He couldn’t believe they’d tracked down who he really was. He thought Tony Montana had disappeared in the hills of Angola. Tony Montana had died on a ship in the mid-Atlantic. It was something to learn, that the world had a network subtle enough to pick up a nobody. Your store of treasures didn’t help you a bit, nor your best disguises, nor all the princely women who’d told you the story of their lives.
    It was the last thing he would learn about the world for the next five years. Back in Havana they put him on trial for twenty minutes—desertion—and then he was sentenced to twenty years. Twenty years was life these days. Nobody lived past forty in a Cuban jail, not since the revolution. Tony Montana, the one they would call Scarface, was led away in a stunned silence. The key that turned in the lock was forever.
    Only Tony Montana himself knew there would be a next chance. He couldn’t have learned what he’d learned for nothing. A man who had a destiny had to have three chances. And so he waited, month after month. He needed no one. He wanted nothing. All he knew was this: his apprenticeship was done. When he next got out he would own the world, or leave it in ashes before they’d ever take him again.

Chapter Two
    T HE WIND HAD been rising all night in the Florida Straits. By dawn the waves were fifteen feet, and only the barest bruise of day got through the moiling clouds. Lightning shot the sea, and the thunder fell like bombs. The trawler had gone astray about two A.M. , but the captain didn’t find out till after five, when he came up to relieve the drunken sailor nodding in the wheelhouse. Now the captain sat at the shortwave, probing a break in the static. With so many overfilled boats in the Straits, he doubted the Coast Guard would answer a “Mayday.” But he knew every groan in his ship, and it felt like she might break up from the strain and the extra weight. He had a boat for maybe sixty. There were two hundred and thirty-four people aboard.
    Most of the refugees were huddling on the deck. They held to their families in pitiful clumps, the thin blankets tented about them soaking wet from the spray of the waves. A toothless retard, half-naked, his shirt draped around his head, capered around the deck, giggling and pointing a finger at the storm. The men with their families shoved him away, and he caromed from group to group, spinning his laugh like an incantation. Every time the ship rose up on an angry swell, a chatter like a tribe of monkeys rose from the crowd on deck. There was panic, but they didn’t dare move for fear they would be thrown overboard.
    Tony stayed close to Manolo, right up at the prow of the ship. The younger man lay curled and shivering on the anchor chain. He’d been vomiting his guts out all night long. At each heave of the ship he groaned and cursed, but softly, like a man praying. He had no strength left to shout. Tony, meanwhile, leaned out over the rail of the ship, dousing his face in the sea spray. He laughed at the power of the storm. He almost seemed to be urging it to greater heights, shouting into the wind as if he was master of the revels. He dropped to Manolo’s side and shook him.
    “Whatsa matter, chico?”
    “I wish I was back in my cell,” said Manolo, moaning through gritted teeth. “I miss the cockroaches.”
    “Hey, babe, this is good for you. Clean out your system. In a month you’ll be eating lobster. Steaks this