Sanderson had good reason to be optimistic about Puerto Rico. From his vantage point at Adelante, he was in on more deals and making more money than he knew what to do with. I had no doubt that, barring the possibility of a great upswing in analysts’ fees, he was no more than ten years away from being a millionaire. He said five, but I doubled it because it seemed almost indecent that a man doing Sanderson’s kind of work should make a million dollars before he was forty.
He was so much on top of things that I suspected that he had lost sight of the line between business and conspiracy. When somebody wanted land for a new hotel, when a top-level disagreement sent rumblings through the administration, or when anything of importance was on its way to happening, Sanderson usually knew more about it than the Governor.
This fascinated me, for I had always been an observer, one who arrived on the scene and got a small amount of money for writing what he saw and whatever he could find out by asking a few hurried questions. Now, listening to Sanderson, I felt on the verge of a massive breakthrough. Considering the confusion of The Boom and the grab-bag morality that was driving it along, I felt for the first time in my life that I might get a chance to affect the course of things instead of merely observing them. I might even get rich; God knows, it seemed easy enough. I gave it a lot of thought, and though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.
Five
Sala’s apartment on Calle Tetuan was about as homey as a cave, a dank grotto in the very bowels of the Old City. It was not an upscale neighborhood. Sanderson shunned it and Zimburger called it a sewer. It reminded me of a big handball court in some stench-ridden YMCA. The ceiling was twenty feet high, not a breath of clean air, no furniture except two metal cots and an improvised picnic table, and since it was on the ground floor we could never open the windows because thieves would come in off the street and sack the place. A week after Sala moved in he left one of the windows unlocked and everything he owned was stolen, even his shoes and his dirty socks.
We had no refrigerator and therefore no ice, so we drank hot rum out of dirty glasses and did our best to stay out of the place as much as possible. It was easy to understand why Sala didn’t mind sharing; neither of us ever went there except to change clothes or sleep. Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al’s, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the apartment.
After living there a week I’d established a fairly strict routine. I would sleep until ten or so, depending on the noise level in the street, then take a shower and walk up to Al’s for breakfast. With a few exceptions, the normal workday at the paper was from noon until eight in the evening, give or take a few hours either way. Then we would come back to Al’s for dinner. After that it was the casinos, an occasional party, or simply sitting at Al’s and listening to each other’s stories until we all got drunk and mumbled off to our beds. Sometimes I would go to Sanderson’s and usually there were people there to drink with. Except for Segarra and the wretched greedhead Zimburger, almost everyone at Sanderson’s was from New York or Miami or the Virgin Islands. They were buyers or builders or sellers in one way or another, and now that I look back on it I don’t recall a single name or face out of the hundred or so that I met there. Not a distinctive soul in the lot, but it was a pleasant, social kind of atmosphere and a welcome break from those dreary nights at Al’s.
One Monday morning I was awakened by what sounded like children being butchered outside the window. I looked through a crack in the shutter and saw about fifteen tiny Puerto Ricans, dancing on the sidewalk and tormenting a three-legged dog. I cursed them viciously and hurried up to Al’s for breakfast.