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shirt covered with the blood of others, who went facedown into the water of the Zayas fountain. The others kept on toward Montserrate, shooting at anything coming after them, anything ahead of them that impeded their way to someplace else.

    Quinn sat in a fifth-floor mini-suite at the Hotel Regis, studying the shape of Cooney’s head bandage, which looked like a turban wrapped by a one-handed Arab, absurd enough to match the cause of the injury, large enough to match the reputation of the man who caused it. Cooney wasn’t clear on Quinn’s purpose in coming here, nor was Quinn. Cooney doubtless paired Quinn with Hemingway as the enemy, but Quinn had apologized in his call from the house phone, asking for a meeting to explain what he was not sure he could explain. He would not claim illness or pathological aggression for Hemingway; but the subject needed examination. It still might turn into an article for Max, but Quinn didn’t need that either. He was out to affix reality onto experience for himself, maybe also for Cooney, and rescue the event from drift into fistic barroom legend that would otherwise end with a whimper as the stretcher exits the Floridita and another right cross and a left hook from Hemingway become a footnote in the archive. There was more to it than that.
    One of Cooney’s pals from Jersey sat beside him with narrow eyes and a pushed-out lip, keeping watch on this visitor who might be bringing new trouble. Quinn remembered the man from the bar. He didn’t speak and Cooney didn’t introduce him.
    “How’s your head?” Quinn asked.
    “They say the skull’s not cracked, just cut and swelled up,” Cooney said. “But that son of a pup ain’t heard the last of Joe Cooney, I kid you not.”
    “Are you a vengeful man, Mr. Cooney?”
    “Revenge? I’m sure as hell gonna get me some.”
    “You’ve got a right. But I should warn you—he’s got money and power down here. And he’s very famous, and well-loved.”
    “They love him? Don’t he punch out any Cubans?”
    “Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s no stranger to fights. But he’s king of the Floridita. That’s his domain.”
    “King of a barroom.”
    “And of everybody who walks into it.”
    “How’d he get to be such a big shot?”
    “He wrote some great books.”
    “That don’t seem enough.”
    “He also fights in all the wars.”
    “I fought in the Pacific. Got a Silver Star.”
    “If he knew that he wouldn’t have hit you.”
    “Why’d he hit me?”
    “He had a problem with your song. He also likes power and thinks you get it with your fists or your gun. He’s a serious hunter.”
    “So am I.”
    “You and he have a lot in common.”
    “He send you here to see what I’m gonna do?”
    “No. I only met him for the first time myself last night.”
    “Hit me a sucker punch, for what?”
    “I agree it was barbaric.”
    “Whatever the hell that means.”
    “It means savage, uncivilized. The primitive arrogance of force. Crude exercise of the ego. Everybody’s an enemy who isn’t himself. Nothing personal, now, but he sees you as a cipher, a zero, a cliché, a mark. Fair game for lofty thinkers.”
    “Shit,” said Cooney’s friend, and he stood up from his chair.
    Quinn heard the fireworks outside, then explosions. Cooney’s friend opened the louvered screen doors and went onto the balcony overlooking the street and Zayas Park.
    “They’re shootin’ down there,” the friend said. “Cops or soldiers looks like.”
    Quinn and Cooney stood up to look out. Uniformed men were shooting at people near the Palace. The street was chaotic, people running, crouching behind cars, in doorways, traffic stopped, police firing at civilians who were shooting machine guns. Machine-gun fire strafed a bus and shattered its windshield, and the bus driver climbed the sidewalk. A soldier in the turret of a tanqueta, an armored truck, looked up at the front of the Regis, then turned his machine gun and raised it. Quinn said, “Look