Free Havana by Stephen Hunter

isn’t that right? He cleaned up Hot Springs. Didn’t stay clean long, but he did the job up fine, as my friend Fred Becker tells the story. Ain’t that so, Earl?”
    â€œWe fought ’em but it did seem they got that town up and running again fast after the shooting stopped,” was all Earl could admit, for he had dark superstitions that moneys were paid and that some of Arkansas’s most distinguished sons—like the heroic Hot Springs reformer Fred Becker, who rode his victory to the governor’s mansion, and the wise and compassionate Harry Etheridge, congressman and Washington kingmaker—all somehow turned out the richer for it.
    And now finally, on the night of the fourth day, they had descended to the lowest of the low, to the lower end of the seventeen blocks of Zanja Street, where everything was cheap and easy. The long byway carved a streak through Centro, aiming toward the far more elegant Prado, but where the Prado made many think of Paris, Zanja made men think only of sex. It was lined with bodegas, fruit stands, old women rolling cigars at card tables along the street, lottery agencies—the town seemed washed in numbers, testament to the greed that lay everywhere—bars and tabernas, nightclubs of smoky reputation, a mess of open-air Chinese restaurants just off the main drag, the mysterious doors in which a single square hatch opened, a man was examined, then admitted—and of course the Shanghai Theater.
    They pulled the big Cadillac slowly over the cobblestones and the building itself came into view.
    â€œI do believe we ought to take a look-see,” said the boss.
    â€œMight never get a chance like this again.”
    â€œDriver, did you hear?” Lane, sitting next to Harry, asked.
    â€œSi, Señor Brodgins,” said Pepe, a sergeant in the police seconded to chauffeur’s duty. He pulled the car over not far from the destination.
    â€œEarl, you go on in and make sure it’s safe, now, you hear?” said Lane.
    Earl looked at 205 Zanja on the shabby whore street whose washing of pastels only emphasized its crummy squalor, and saw just a big theater marquee with T EATRO S HANGHAI lit by orange lamps so that it had a lurid blood glow to it. Chinese symbols ran down the wall flanking the ratty entrance on either side, also orange in the lamplight. One of the lamps, however, was somehow miswired, and it flickered and crackled and nobody had gotten around to fixing it yet. Like a broken radio, it leaked hiss and sputter into the night, while it pulsed orange weirdness across the land.
    Earl looked at Lane, bathed in the orange light so that he seemed to be an ice cream treat. Lane nudged him forward with a little shooing motion of his eyes. Earl got out, slipped toward the theater, and stepped in. It was shabby inside as out, and seemingly deserted, and a small box office under a sign in Spanish (but with $1.25 clearly marked) stood toward the rear. But it smelled not of popcorn but of disinfectant, and soon enough a fat Cuban came to him with a hand out for the buck-two-bits, and Earl just flashed the big automatic in his shoulder holster, as if to say, I am here to see what I will see. The man melted away, smiling broadly and insincerely.
    Earl stepped through a curtain and into a darkness. He was aware of other men in there, an immensity of them, row after row after row, silent and transfixed, and the smell of more disinfectant, and in the glare of the screen he could see the men staring, unmoving, unbelieving. He looked up. In bold black and white a woman in a mask seemed to have something in her mouth and be working it easily, and it took a little while for Earl to put the details together and then he realized what she had in her mouth and that she herself wore only stockings and heels and that flabby immensity to the left of the screen was her big butt, inelegantly parted, revealing in its flaccidity that which should not be revealed. He