Live by Night (15 page)

Then Holly Peletos, a White button man, rotated in to do five years for involuntary manslaughter and started running his mouth in the mess hall about regime change. So they had to throw him off the tier.

Some weeks Joe went two or three nights without sleep because of the fear, or because he was trying to figure out all the angles, or because his heart wouldn't stop banging inside his chest like it was trying to break free.

You told yourself it wouldn't get to you.

You told yourself this place wouldn't eat your soul.

But what you told yourself above all else was,
I will live
.

I will walk out of here.

Whatever the cost.

Maso was released on a spring morning in 1928.

“Next time you see me,” he said to Joe, “will be Visitors' Day. I'll be on the other side of that mesh.”

Joe shook his hand. “Be safe.”

“I got my mouthpiece working on your case. You'll be out soon. Stay alert, kid, stay alive.”

Joe tried to take comfort in the words, but he knew that if that's all they were—words—then he was in for a sentence that would feel twice as long because he'd allowed hope in. As soon as Maso left this place behind, he could very easily leave Joe behind.

Or he could give him just enough of the carrot to keep Joe running his operation behind these walls for him with no intention of hiring him once he reached the outside.

Either way, Joe was powerless to do anything but sit and wait to see how things shook out.

When Maso hit the street, it was hard not to notice. What had been simmering on the inside got splashed with gasoline on the outside. Murderous May, as the rags dubbed it, left Boston looking for the first time like Detroit or Chicago. Maso's soldiers hit Albert White's bookies, distillers, trucks, and soldiers like it was open season. And it was. Within one month, Maso chased Albert White out of Boston, his few remaining soldiers scurrying after him.

In prison, it was as if harmony had been injected into the water supply. The stabbings stopped. For the rest of '28, no one got thrown off a tier or shanked in the chow line. Joe knew that peace had truly come to Charlestown Penitentiary when he was able to forge a deal with two of Albert White's best incarcerated distillers to ply their trade behind the walls. Soon, the guards were smuggling gin
out
of Charlestown Penitentiary, the shit so good it even picked up a street name, Penal Code.

Joe slept soundly for the first time since he'd walked through the front gates in the summer of '27. It also gave him time to mourn his father and mourn Emma, a process he'd held at bay when it would have pulled his thoughts to places they shouldn't have gone while others plotted against him.

The cruelest trick God played on him through the second half of '28 was sending Emma to visit him while he slept. He'd feel her leg snake between his, smell the single drops of perfume she placed behind each ear, open his eyes to see hers an inch away, feel her breath on his lips. He'd raise his arms off the mattress so he could run his palms down her bare back. And his eyes would open for real.

No one.

Just the dark.

And he'd pray. He'd ask God to let her be alive, even if he never saw her again. Please let her be alive.

But, God, alive or dead, could you please, please stop sending her to my dreams? I can't lose her again and again. It's too much. It's too cruel. Lord, Joe asked, have mercy.

But he didn't.

The visitations continued—and would continue—for the rest of Joe's incarceration at Charlestown Penitentiary.

His father never visited. But Joe felt him in a way he never had while the man was alive. Sometimes he sat on his bunk, flicking the watch cover open and closed, open and closed, and he imagined conversations they might have had if all the stale sins and withered expectations hadn't stood in the way.

Tell me about Mom.

What do you want to know?

Who was she?

A frightened girl. A very frightened girl, Joseph.

What was she afraid of?

Out there.

What's out there?

Everything she didn't understand.

Did she love me?

In her own way.

That's not love.

For her it was. Don't look at it as if she left you.

How am I supposed to look at it?

That she hung on because of you. Otherwise, she would have left us all years ago.

I don't miss her.

Funny. I do.

Joe looked into the dark.
I miss you.

You'll see me soon enough.

O
nce Joe had streamlined the prison's distillery and smuggling operations as well as its protection rackets, he had plenty of time to read. He read just about everything in the prison library, which was no small feat, thanks to Lancelot Hudson III.

Lancelot Hudson III had been the only rich man anyone could ever remember who'd been sentenced to hard time in Charlestown Pen'. But Lancelot's crime had been so outrageous and so public—he'd thrown his unfaithful wife, Catherine, from the roof of their four-story Beacon Street town house
into
the Independence Day Parade of 1919 as it flowed down Beacon Hill—that even the Brahmins had put down their bone china long enough to decide that if there was ever a time to feed one of their own to the natives, this was it. Lancelot Hudson III served seven years at Charlestown for involuntary manslaughter. If it wasn't exactly hard labor, it was hard time, mitigated only by the books he'd had shipped into the prison, a deal dependent on his leaving them behind when he left. Joe read at least a hundred books of the Hudson collection. You knew they were his because, in the top right corner of the title page, he'd written in tiny, cramped penmanship, “Originally the Property of Lancelot Hudson III. Fuck you.” Joe read Dumas and Dickens and Twain. He read Malthus, Adam Smith, Marx and Engels, Machiavelli,
The Federalist Papers,
and Bastiat's
Economic Sophisms
. When he'd burned through the Hudson collection, he read whatever else was on hand—dime novels and Westerns mostly—as well as every magazine and newspaper they allowed in. He became something of an expert at figuring out what words or whole sentences they'd censored.

Browsing an issue of the
Boston Traveler,
he came across a story about a fire at the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. A frayed electrical cord had sent sparks into the terminal Christmas tree. In short order, the building caught fire. The breath in Joe's body went small and trapped as he studied the photographs of the damage. The locker where he'd stashed his life's savings, including the $62,000 from the Pittsfield job, was in the corner of one shot. It lay on its side under a ceiling beam, the metal as black as soil.

Joe couldn't decide which felt worse—the sensation that he'd never breathe again or the feeling that he was about to vomit fire through his windpipe.

The article claimed the building was a total loss. Nothing salvaged. Joe doubted that. Someday, when he had the time, he was going to track down which employee of the East Coast Bus Line had retired young and was rumored to be living abroad and in style.

Until then, he was going to need a job.

M
aso offered it to him late that winter, the same day he told Joe his appeal was proceeding apace.

“You'll be out of here soon,” Maso told him through the mesh.

“All due respect,” Joe said, “how soon?”

“By the summer.”

Joe smiled. “Really?”

Maso nodded. “Judges don't come cheap, though. You're going to have to work that off.”

“Why don't we call us even for me not killing you?”

Maso narrowed his eyes, a natty figure now in his cashmere topcoat and a wool suit complete with a white carnation in his lapel that matched his silk hatband. “Sounds like a deal. Our friend, Mr. White, is making a lot of noise in Tampa, by the way.”

“Tampa?”

Maso nodded. “He still held on to a few places here. I can't get them all because New York owns a piece and they've made it clear I don't fuck with them right now. He runs the rum up on our routes and there's nothing I can do about that, either. But because he's infringing on my turf down there, the boys in New York gave us permission to push him out.”

“What level of permission?” Joe said.

“Short of killing him.”

“Okay. So what're you going to do?”

“Not what I'm going to do. It's what you're going to do, Joe. I want you to take over down there.”

“But Lou Ormino runs Tampa.”

“He's gonna decide he doesn't want the headache anymore.”

“When's he going to decide that?”

“About ten minutes before you get there.”

Joe gave it some thought. “Tampa, huh?”

“It's hot.”

“I don't mind hot.”

“You ain't never felt hot like this hot.”

Joe shrugged. The old man had a penchant for exaggerating. “I'm going to need somebody I can trust there.”

“I knew you'd say that.”

“Yeah?”

Maso nodded. “It's already done. He's been there six months.”

“Where'd you find him?”

“Montreal.”

“Six months?” Joe said. “How long you been planning this?”

“Since Lou Ormino started putting some of my cut in his pocket and Albert White showed up to grub up the rest.” He leaned forward. “You go down there and make it right, Joe? Spend the rest of your life living like a king.”

“So if I take over, are we equal partners?”

“No,” Maso said.

“But Lou Ormino's an equal partner.”

“And look how that's going to end up.” Maso stared through the mesh at Joe with his true face.

“How much do I get then?”

“Twenty percent.”

“Twenty-five,” Joe said.

“Fine,” Maso said with a twinkle in his eye that said he'd have gone to thirty. “But you better earn it.”

PART II

Ybor

1929–1933

Chapter Eleven

Best in the City

W
hen Maso had first proposed that Joe take over his West Florida operations, he'd warned him about the heat. But Joe still wasn't prepared for the wall of it that met him when he stepped onto the platform at Tampa Union Station on an August morning in 1929. He wore a summer-weight glen plaid suit. He'd left the vest behind in his suitcase, but standing on the platform, waiting for the porter to bring his bags, jacket over his arm and tie loosened, he was soaked by the time he finished smoking a cigarette. He'd removed his Wilton when he stepped off the train, worried that the heat would leach the pomade from his hair and suck it into the silk lining, but he put it back on to protect his skull from the sun needles as more pores in his chest and arms sprang leaks.

It wasn't just the sun, which hung high and white in a sky swept so clear of clouds it was as if clouds had never existed (and maybe they didn't down here; Joe had no idea), it was the jungle humidity, like he was wrapped inside a ball of steel wool someone had dropped into a pot of oil. And every minute or so, the burner got turned up another notch.

The other men who'd exited the train had, like Joe, removed their suit jackets; some had removed their vests and ties and rolled up their sleeves. Some had donned their hats; others had removed them and waved them in front of their faces. The women travelers wore wide-brimmed velvet hats, felt cloches, or poke bonnets. Some poor souls had elected for even heavier material and ear treatments. They wore crepe dresses and silk scarves, but they didn't look very happy about it, their faces red, their carefully tended hair sprouting splits and curls, the chignons unraveling at the napes of a few necks.

You could tell the locals easily—the men wore skimmers, short-sleeved shirts, and gabardine trousers. Their shoes were two-toned like most men's these days but more brightly colored than those of the train passengers. If the women wore headgear, they wore straw gigolo hats. They wore very simple dresses, lots of white, like the one on the gal passing him now, absolutely nothing special about her white skirt and matching blouse and both a little threadbare. But, Jesus, Joe thought, the body under it—moving under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water.

The heat must have made him slower than usual because the woman caught him looking, something he'd never been nabbed for back home. But the woman—a mulatto or maybe even a Negress of some kind, he couldn't tell, but definitely dark, copper dark—gave him a damning flick of her eyes and kept walking. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the two years in prison, but Joe couldn't stop watching her move beneath the thin dress. Her hips rose and fell in the same languid motion as her ass, a music to it all as the bones and muscles in her back rose and fell in a concert of the body. Jesus, he thought, I have been in prison too long. Her dark wiry hair was tied into a chignon at the back of her head, but a single strand fell down her neck. She turned back to shoot him a glare. He looked down before it reached him, feeling like a nine-year-old who'd been caught pulling a girl's pigtails in the schoolyard. And then he wondered what he had to be ashamed of. She'd looked back, hadn't she?

When he looked up again, she was lost to the crowd down the other end of the platform.
You have nothing to fear from me,
he wanted to tell her.
You'll never break my heart and I'll never break yours. I'm out of the heartbreak business.

Joe had spent the last two years accepting not only that Emma was dead but that, for him, there'd never be another love. Someday, he might marry, but it would be a sensible arrangement, certain to raise him up in his profession and give him heirs. He loved the idea of that word—
heirs
. (Working-class men had sons. Successful men had heirs.) In the meantime, he'd go to whores. Maybe the woman who'd shot him the dirty look was a whore playing the “chaste” tip. If she was, he'd definitely try her out—a beautiful mulatto whore fit for a criminal prince.

When the porter deposited Joe's bags in front of him, Joe tipped him with bills grown as damp as everything else. He'd been told someone would meet his train, but he'd never thought to ask how they'd pick him out of the crowd. He turned in a slow pivot, looking for a man who appeared sufficiently disreputable, but instead he saw the mulatto woman walking back down the platform toward him. Another strand of hair fell from along her temple and she brushed it back off her cheekbone with her free hand. Her other arm was wrapped in the arm of a Latin guy in a straw skimmer and tan silk trousers with long, sharp pleats and a white collarless shirt buttoned to the top. In this heat, the man's face was dry, as was his shirt, even at the top, where the button was cinched tight below his Adam's apple. He moved with the same gentle sway as the woman; it was in his calves and his ankles, even as the steps themselves were so sharp his feet snapped off the platform.

They passed Joe speaking Spanish, the words coming fast and light, and the woman gave Joe the quickest of glances, so quick he might have imagined it, though he doubted it. The man pointed at something down the platform and said something in his rapid Spanish, and they both chuckled, and then they were past him.

He was turning to take another look for whoever was picking him up, when someone did just that—lifted him off the hot platform like he weighed no more than a sack of laundry. He looked down at the two beefy arms wrapped around his midsection and smelled a familiar reek of raw onions and Arabian Sheik cologne.

He was dropped back onto the platform and spun around and he faced his old friend for the first time since that awful day in Pittsfield.

“Dion,” he said.

Dion had traded chubbiness for corpulence. He wore a champagne-colored four-button suit, chalk-striped. His lavender shirt had a high white contrasting collar over a bloodred tie with black stripes. His black and white speculator shoes were laced up above the ankles. If you asked an old man gone poor of sight to identify the gangster on the platform from a hundred yards away, he'd point his shaking finger at Dion.

“Joseph,” he said with a starchy formality. Then his round face collapsed around a wide smile and he lifted Joe off the ground again, this time from the front and hugged him so tight Joe feared for his spine.

“Sorry about your father,” he whispered.

“Sorry about your brother.”

“Thank you,” Dion said with a strange brightness. “All for canned ham.” He let Joe down and smiled. “I would have bought him his own pigs.”

They walked down the platform in the heat.

Dion took one of Joe's suitcases from him. “When Lefty Downer found me in Montreal and told me the Pescatores wanted me to come work for them, I thought it was a right bamboozle, I don't mind telling you. But then they said you were jailing with the old man and I thought, ‘If anyone could charm the devil himself, it's my old partner.' ” He slapped a thick arm against Joe's shoulders. “It's just swell to have you back.”

Joe said, “Good to be out in free air.”

“Was Charlestown . . . ?”

Joe nodded. “Maybe worse than they say. But I figured out a way to make it livable.”

“Bet you did.”

The heat was even whiter in the parking lot. It bounced up off the crushed shell lot and off the cars, and Joe placed a hand above his eyebrows but it didn't help much.

“Christ,” he said to Dion, “and you're wearing a three-piece.”

“Here's the secret,” Dion said as they reached a Marmon 34 and he dropped Joe's suitcase to the crushed shell pavement. “Next time you're in a department store, clip every shirt in your size. I wear four in a day.”

Joe looked at his lavender shirt. “You found four in that color?”

“Found eight.” He opened the back door of the car and put Joe's luggage inside. “We're only going a few blocks, but in this heat . . .”

Joe reached for the passenger door but Dion beat him to it. Joe looked at him. “You're having me on.”

“I work for you now,” Dion said. “Boss Joe Coughlin.”

“Quit it.” Joe shook his head at the absurdity of it and climbed inside.

As they pulled out of the station lot, Dion said, “Reach under your seat. You'll find a friend.”

Joe did and came back with a Savage .32 automatic. Indian Head grips and a three-and-a-half-inch barrel. Joe slid it into the right pocket of his trousers and told Dion he'd need a holster for it, feeling a mild irritation that Dion hadn't thought to bring one with him.

“You want mine?” Dion said.

“No,” Joe said. “I'm fine.”

“Because I can give you mine.”

“No,” Joe said, thinking that being the boss was going to take some getting used to. “I'll just need one soon.”

“End of the day,” Dion said. “No later, I promise.”

Traffic moved as slow as everything else down here. Dion drove them into Ybor City. Here the sky lost its hard white and picked up a bronze smear from the factory smoke. Cigars, Dion explained, had built this neighborhood. He pointed at brick buildings and their tall smokestacks and the smaller buildings—some just shotgun shacks with front and back doors open—where workers sat hunched over tables rolling cigars.

He rattled off the names—El Reloj and Cuesta-Rey, Bustillo, Celestino Vega, El Paraiso, La Pila, La Trocha, El Naranjal, Perfecto Garcia. He told Joe the most esteemed position in any factory was that of the reader, a man who sat in a chair in the center of the work floor and read aloud from great novels as the workers toiled. He explained that a cigar maker was called a
tabaquero,
the small factories were
chinchals
or buckeyes, and the food he might be smelling through the smoke stench was probably
bolos
or
empanadas.

“Listen to you.” Joe whistled. “Speaking the language like the king of Spain.”

“You have to around here,” Dion said. “Italian too. You better brush up.”

“You speak Italian, my brother did, but I never picked it up.”

“Well, I hope you're still as quick a learner as you used to be. Reason we get to do our business here in Ybor is because the rest of the city just leaves us alone. Far as they're concerned, we're just dirty spics and dirty wops and as long as we don't make too much noise or the cigar workers don't go on strike again, make the owners call in the cops and the head breakers, then we're left to do what we do.” He turned onto Seventh Avenue, apparently a main drag, people bustling along the clapboard sidewalks under two-story buildings with wide balconies and wrought iron trellises and brick or stucco facades that reminded Joe of the lost weekend he'd had in New Orleans a couple years ago. Tracks ran down the center of the avenue and Joe saw a trolley coming their way from several blocks off, its nose disappearing, then reappearing behind waves of heat.

“You'd think we'd all get along,” Dion said, “but it doesn't always work out that way. The Italians and the Cubans keep to themselves. But the black Cubans hate the white Cubans, and the white Cubans look at the nigger Cubans like they're niggers, and they both high-hat everyone else. All Cubans hate the Spaniards. Spaniards think the Cubans are uppity coons who forgot their place since the US of A freed them back in '98. Then the Cubans
and
the Spanish look down on the Puerto Ricans, and everyone shits on the Dominicans. The Italians only respect you if you came off the boat from the Boot, and the
Americanos
actually think someone gives a shit what they think sometimes.”

“Did you actually call us
Americanos
?”

“I'm Italian,” Dion said, turning left and running them down another wide avenue, although this one wasn't paved. “And around here? Proud of it.”

Joe saw the blue of the Gulf and the ships in port and the high cranes. He could smell salt, oil slicks, low tide.

“Port of Tampa,” Dion said with a flourish of his hand as he drove them along redbrick streets where men crossed their path in forklifts that burped diesel smoke and the cranes swung two-ton pallets high over their heads, the shadows of the netting crisscrossing the windshield. A steam whistle blew.

Dion pulled over by a cargo pit and they got out, watched the men below take apart a bale of burlap sacks stamped
ESCUINTIA, GUATEMALA
. From the smell, Joe could tell some of the sacks held coffee and others chocolate. The half-dozen men off-loaded them in no time, and the crane swung the netting and the empty pallet back up, and the men in the hold disappeared through a doorway down there.

Dion led Joe to the ladder and descended.

“Where we going?”

“You'll see.”

At the bottom of the hold, the men had closed the door behind them. He and Dion stood on a dirt floor that smelled of everything ever off-loaded in the Tampa sun—bananas and pineapple and grain. Oil and potatoes and gas and vinegar. Gunpowder. Spoiled fruit and fresh coffee, the grounds crunching underfoot. Dion placed the flat of his hand to the cement wall opposite the ladder and moved his hand to the right and the wall went with it—just popped up and out of a seam Joe couldn't see from two feet away. Dion revealed a door and rapped on it twice, then waited, his lips moving as he counted. Then he rapped it another four times and a voice on the other side said, “Who's it?”

“Fireplace,” Dion said, and the door opened.

A corridor faced them, as thin as the man on the other side of the door, who was dressed in a shirt that might have been white before the sweat tanned it for the ages. His trousers were a brown denim, and he wore a kerchief around his neck and a cowboy hat. A six-gun stuck out of the waistband of his denim trousers. The cowboy nodded at Dion and allowed them to pass before he pushed the wall back into place.