Read Havana Best Friends for Free Online

stared at the strange pair: some recalled
Twins
, the movie starring Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
    The temperature had dropped considerably as a consequence of a late-afternoon heavy shower. Lighting from the shop windows of well-stocked, dollars-only stores reflected on the wet asphalt. A Brazilian soap opera and various pop songs blared out from radios, CD players, and television sets in an ear-splitting cacophony.
    There were police officers on every corner, most of them alert young men fresh from the countryside, still in awe of city slickers: the pickpockets, whores, pimps, drag queens, male prostitutes, shoplifters, drug pushers, and black marketeers that trained eyes can detect along the Havana tourist trail.
    A handful of veteran cops in their thirties, with bored expressions and cynical grins, whispered advice to the rookies. They were cops who’d survived by staying within the limit of permissiblecorruption: yes to a three-dollar sandwich, no to a one-dollar bill; yes to a hooker’s free ride, no to a pair of jeans offered by her pimp; yes to a packet of cigarettes, no to a box of fake Cohibas.
    Pablo and John turned left onto Havana Street and after three blocks took a right onto the seedier Empedrado Street. Watching them walk side by side, two candidates for the priesthood returning to the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary were reminded of the David and Goliath story. A dark-skinned black youngster and a white teenager approached the strange pair.
    “Mister, mister, cigars, guitars, girls …,” they accosted John in English.
    “I’m with him,” Pablo said in Spanish, glaring at them. They weren’t impressed by the news and ignored the short man with the stumpy ponytail. “Girls, beautiful. Cohibas, forty dollars. Fine guitars, eighty dollars.”
    “No,” said John.
    “Coke? Marijuana?”
    “No.”
    “I’m taking him to Angelito’s,” said Pablo, again in Spanish, trying to act nonchalant.
    That stopped the hustlers cold. They turned their backs and disappeared into a doorway. John stared at the narrowest sidewalk he had seen in his life, not more than twenty inches wide.
    “Now, look up, at the … 
balcón?
You say
balcón
in English?”
    John frowned in incomprehension.
    “The
balcón
of the house on the next corner,” Pablo said, extending his arm and pointing.
    Four young women leaned on the railing of a wrought-iron balcony projecting from the top floor of an old, dilapidated two-storey house. Light from a nearby streetlamp made it possible tosee that two of the whores sported shorts, a third had a miniskirt on, the fourth a French-cut bikini bottom. All wore halter tops and from their necks hung chains and medals. Gazing down at the street below, they were sharing a laugh.
    “Interested?” Pablo asked.
    “Let’s take a closer look.”
    As they climbed a marble stairway, Pablo said this was La Casa de Angelito, Angelito’s house, according to his translation. Greeted warmly on the landing by a white, effeminate bodybuilder in green Lycra shorts and a pink tank top, they were showed into a dim living room with four loveseats, a CD player, a minibar, and side tables for drinks and ashtrays. Three French windows opened onto the balcony where the women remained, unaware that potential clients had arrived. The body-sculpting fanatic clapped his hands and ordered, “Girls, saloon.”
    One of the hookers upstaged the others completely, John realized. She was one of those precious few women from all walks of life who try to underplay their devastating sex appeal and fail miserably. The blessing or curse of her sexiness – depending on the final outcome – is as indefinable as inexorable, impossible to disguise or accentuate with clothing, jewellery, or perfumes. A gorgeous American actress worth maybe a hundred million who had the seductiveness of a refrigerator sprang to mind. And here in Havana, in a tumbledown whorehouse, he was facing a two-bit hooker capable of