Live by Night (18 page)

They drank. Joe was stunned by how smooth and rich it was. This is what liquor tasted like when you had more than an hour to distill it, more than a week to ferment it. Christ.

“This is exceptional.”

“It's the fifteen-year,” Esteban said. “I never agreed with the Spanish mandate from the old days that lighter rum was superior.” He shook his head at the notion and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Of course, we Cubans went along because of our belief that lighter is better in all things—hair, skin, eyes.”

The Suarezes were light-skinned themselves, descended from the Spanish strain, not the African.

“Yes,” Esteban said, reading Joe's thought. “My sister and I aren't of the lesser classes. That doesn't mean we agree with the social order of our island.”

He took another sip of rum and Joe did the same.

Dion said, “Be nice if we could sell this up north.”

Ivelia laughed. It was very sharp and very short. “Someday. When your government treats you like adults again.”

“No rush,” Joe said. “We'd all be out of a job.”

Esteban said, “My sister and I would be fine. We have this restaurant and two in Havana and one in Key West. We have a sugar plantation in Cárdenas and a coffee plantation in Marianao.”

“So why do this at all?”

Esteban shrugged in his perfect dinner jacket. “Money.”

“More money, you mean.”

He raised his glass to that. “There are other things to spend money on besides”—he waved his arm at the room—“things.”

“So says the man with a lot of things,” Dion said, and Joe shot him a look.

Joe noticed for the first time that the west wall of the office was given over entirely to black-and-white photographs—street scenes mostly, the facades of nightclubs, a few faces, a couple of villages so dilapidated they'd fall over in the next wind.

Ivelia followed his gaze. “My brother takes them.”

Joe said, “Yeah?”

Esteban nodded. “On my trips home. It's a hobby.”

“A hobby,” his sister said with a scoff. “My brother's photographs have been published in
Time
magazine.”

Esteban gave it all a diffident shrug.

“They're good,” Joe said.

“Someday maybe I'll photograph you, Mr. Coughlin.”

Joe shook his head. “I'm with the Indians on that one, I'm afraid.”

Esteban gave that a wry smile. “Speaking of captured souls, I was sorry to hear of the passing of Senor Ormino last night.”

“Were you?” Dion asked.

Esteban gave that a chuckle so soft it was almost indistinguishable from an exhaled breath. “And friends tell me Gary L. Smith was last seen on the Seaboard Limited with his wife in one Pullman and his
puta maestra
in another. They say his luggage looked hastily packed but there was a lot of it.”

“Sometimes a change of scenery gives a man a new lease on life,” Joe said.

“Is that the case with you?” Ivelia asked. “Have you come to Ybor for a new life?”

“I've come to refine, distill, and distribute the demon rum. But I'm going to have trouble doing that successfully with an erratic import schedule.”

“We don't control every skiff, every tariff officer, every dock,” Esteban said.

“Sure you do.”

“We don't control the tides.”

“The tides haven't slowed the boats to Miami.”

“I don't have anything to do with boats to Miami.”

“I know.” Joe nodded. “Nestor Famosa does. And he assured my associates that the seas this summer have been calm and predictable. I understand Nestor Famosa is a man of his word.”

“By which you imply I'm not.” Esteban poured them all another glass of rum. “You also bring up Senor Famosa so that I will worry he could overtake my supply routes if you and I aren't in accord.”

Joe took his glass off the table and sipped the rum. “I bring up Famosa—Jesus, this rum is flawless—to illustrate my point that the seas were calm this summer. Unseasonably calm, I've been told. I don't have a forked tongue, Senor Suarez, and I don't speak in riddles. Just ask Gary L. Smith. I want to cut out any middlemen and deal with you directly. For that, you can raise your price a bit. I'll buy all the molasses and sugar you've got. I further propose you and I cofinance a better distillery than the ones we've got fattening all the rodents along Seventh Avenue. I didn't just inherit the late Lou Ormino's responsibilities, I inherited the city councillors, cops, and judges in his pockets. Many of these men won't talk to you because you're Cuban, no matter how highly born. You can have access to them through me.”

“Mr. Coughlin, the only reason Senor Ormino had access to those judges and police was because he had Senor Smith as his public face. Those men not only will refuse to do business with a Cuban, but they will also refuse to do business with an Italian. We are all Latin to them, all dark-skinned dogs, good for labor, but little else.”

“Good thing I'm Irish,” Joe said. “I believe you know someone named Arturo Torres.”

A flick of the eyebrows from Esteban.

“I heard he got deported this afternoon,” Joe said.

Esteban said, “I heard that too.”

Joe nodded. “As a gesture of good faith, Arturo was released from jail half an hour ago and is probably downstairs as we speak.”

For one moment, Ivelia's long flat face grew longer with surprise, even delight. She glanced over at Esteban and he nodded. Ivelia went around his desk to the telephone. While they waited, they sipped some rum.

Ivelia hung up the phone and returned to her seat. “He's down at the bar.”

Esteban sat back in his chair and held out his hands, eyes on Joe. “You would want exclusive rights to our molasses, I suppose.”

“Not exclusive,” Joe said. “But you can't sell to the White organization or anyone affiliated with them. Any small operations not associated with them or us can still go about their business. We'll bring them into the fold eventually.”

“And for this I get access to your politicians and your police.”

Joe nodded. “And my judges. Not just the ones we have now but the ones we'll get.”

“The judge you reached today was federally appointed.”

“And has three children with a Negro woman in Ocala that his wife and Herbert Hoover would be surprised to learn about.”

Esteban looked at his sister for a long time before turning back to Joe. “Albert White is a good customer. Has been for some time.”

“Has been for two years,” Joe said. “Ever since someone cut Clive Green's throat in a whorehouse on East Twenty-fourth.”

Esteban raised his eyebrows.

“I've been in prison since March of '27, Senor Suarez. I've had nothing to do but my homework. Can Albert White offer you what I'm offering?”

“No,” Esteban admitted. “But to cut him out would bring me a war I can't afford. I simply can't. I would have liked to have met you two years ago.”

“Well, you're meeting me now,” Joe said. “I've offered you judges, police, politicians, and a distilling model that's centralized so we both share all the profits evenly. I've weeded out the two weakest links in my organization and kept your prized liquor cook from being deported. I did all this so you would consider ending your embargo on the Pescatore operation in Ybor because I thought you were sending us a message. I'm here to tell you I heard the message. And if you tell me what you need, I'll get it. But you must give me what I need.”

Another look between Esteban and his sister.

“There's something you could get us,” she said.

“Okay.”

“But it's well guarded and won't be given up without a fight.”

“Fine, fine,” Joe said. “We'll get it.”

“You don't even know what it is.”

“If we get it, will you cut all ties with Albert White and his associates?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it brings bloodshed.”

“It will most certainly bring bloodshed,” Esteban said.

“Yes,” Joe said, “it will.”

Esteban mourned the thought for a moment, the sadness filling the room. Then he sucked it right back out of the room. “If you do what I ask, Albert White will never see another drop of Suarez molasses or distilled rum. Not one.”

“Will he be able to buy sugar in bulk from you?”

“No.”

“Deal,” Joe said. “What do you need?”

“Guns.”

“Okay. Name your model.”

Esteban reached behind him and took a piece of paper off his desk. He adjusted his glasses as he consulted it. “Browning automatic rifles, automatic handguns, and fifty-caliber machine guns with mounting tripods.”

Joe looked at Dion and they both chuckled.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Esteban said. “Grenades. And box mines.”

“What's a box mine?”

Esteban said, “It's on the ship.”

“What ship?”

“The military transport ship,” Ivelia said. “Pier Seven.” She tilted her head toward the rear wall. “Nine blocks from here.”

“You want us to raid a navy ship,” Joe said.

“Yes.” Esteban looked at his watch. “Within two days, please, or they leave port.” He handed Joe a folded piece of paper. As Joe opened it, he felt a hollowing of his center, and he remembered how he'd carried notes like these to his father. He'd spent two years telling himself the weight of those notes hadn't killed his father. Some nights he almost convinced himself.

Circulo Cubano, 8
A.M.

“You'll go there in the morning,” Esteban said. “You'll meet a woman there, Graciela Corrales. You'll take your orders from her and her partner.”

Joe pocketed the paper. “I don't take orders from a woman.”

“If you want Albert White out of Tampa,” Esteban said, “you'll take orders from her.”

Chapter Thirteen

Hole of the Heart

D
ion drove Joe to his hotel a second time, and Joe told him to stick around until he decided whether or not he was staying in tonight.

The bellman was dressed like a circus monkey in a red velvet tux and matching fez, and he swooped out from behind a potted palm on the veranda and took Joe's suitcases from Dion's hand and led Joe inside while Dion waited at the car. Joe checked in at a marble reception desk and signed the ledger with a gold fountain pen handed to him by a severe Frenchman with a brilliant smile and eyes as dead as a doll's. He was handed a brass key tied to a short length of red velvet rope. At the other end of the rope was a heavy gold square with this room number on it: 509.

It was a suite, actually, with a bed the size of South Boston and delicate French chairs and a delicate French desk overlooking the lake. He had his own bathroom, all right; it was bigger than his cell in Charlestown. The bellman showed him where the outlets were and how to turn on the lamps and the ceiling fans. He showed him the cedar closet where Joe could hang his clothes. He showed him the radio, complimentary in every room, and it made Joe think of Emma and the grand opening of the Hotel Statler. He tipped the bellman and shooed him out and sat in one of the delicate French chairs and smoked a cigarette and looked out at the dark lake and the massive hotel reflected in it, squares and squares of light tilted sideways on the black surface, and he wondered what his father could see right now and what Emma could see. Could they see him? Could they see the past and the future or vast worlds far beyond his imaginings? Or could they see nothing? Because they were nothing. They were dead, they were dust, bones in a box and Emma's not even attached.

He feared this was all there was. Didn't just fear it. Sitting in that ridiculous chair looking out the window at the yellow windows canted in the black water, he knew it. You didn't die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren't dead. Heaven wasn't in the clouds; it was the air in your lungs.

He looked around the room with its high ceilings and chandelier over the enormous bed and curtains as thick as his thigh and he wanted to come out of his skin.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered to his father, even though he knew he couldn't hear him, “it wasn't supposed to be”—he looked around the room again—“this.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and left.

O
utside of Ybor, Tampa was strictly white. Dion showed him a few places above Twenty-fourth Street with wooden signs stating their position on the matter. A grocery store on Nineteenth Avenue wanted it known that
NO DOGS OR LATINS
were allowed and a druggist on Columbus had a
NO LATINS
on the left side of his door and
NO DAGOS
on the right.

Joe looked at Dion. “You all right with that?”

“Of course not, but what're you going to do?”

Joe took a hit off Dion's flask and passed it back to him. “Gotta be some rocks around here.”

It had started to rain, which did nothing to cool things off. Down here, rain felt like more sweat. It was close to midnight, and things just seemed hotter, the humidity a woolen embrace around everything you did. Joe got into the driver's seat and kept the engine idling while Dion shattered both of the druggist windows and then hopped into the car and they drove back into Ybor. Dion explained that the Italians lived around here, in the higher-numbered streets between Fifteenth and Twenty-third. The lighter spics were between Tenth and Fifteenth, the nigger spics below Tenth Street and west of Twelfth Avenue, where most of the cigar factories were.

They found a joint down there at the end of an almost-road that went past the Vayo Cigar Factory and vanished into a cowl of mangrove and cypress. It was nothing more than a shotgun shack on stilts overlooking a swamp. They'd strung netting from the trees along the banks, and the netting covered the shack and the cheap wood tables beside it and the porch out back.

They played some
music
in there. Joe had never heard anything quite like it—Cuban rumba, he guessed, but brassier and more dangerous, and the people on the dance floor were doing something that looked far more like fucking than dancing. Most everyone in there was colored—some American black, mostly Cuban black, though—and those who were merely brown didn't have the Indian features of the highborn Cubans or the Spaniards. Their faces were rounder, their hair more wiry. Half the people knew Dion. The bartender, an older woman, gave him a jug of rum and two glasses without him asking.

“You the new boss?” she asked Joe.

“I guess I am,” Joe said. “I'm Joe. And you are?”

“Phyllis.” She slipped a dry hand into his. “This is my place.”

“It's nice. What's it called?”

“Phyllis's Place.”

“Of course.”

“What do you think of him?” Dion asked Phyllis.

“He too pretty,” she said and looked at Joe. “Someone need to mess you up.”

“We'll get to work on that.”

“See you do,” she said and went to serve another customer.

They took the bottle out onto the back porch and set it on a small table and took residence in two rocking chairs. They looked out through the netting at the swamp as the rain stopped falling and the dragonflies returned. Joe heard something heavy moving through the brush. And something else, just as heavy, moved underneath the porch.

“Reptiles,” Dion said.

Joe lifted his feet off the porch. “What?”

“Alligators,” Dion repeated.

“You're pulling my leg.”

“No,” Dion said, “but they will.”

Joe raised his knees higher. “What the fuck are we doing in a place with alligators?”

Dion shrugged. “You can't escape 'em down here. They're everywhere. You see water, there's ten of 'em in there, big eyes watching.” He wiggled his fingers and bugged his eyes. “Waiting for dumb Yankees to come take a dip.”

Joe heard the one below him slither away and then crash through the mangrove again. He didn't know what to say.

Dion chuckled. “Just don't go in the water.”

“Or near it,” Joe said.

“That too.”

They sat on the porch and drank and the last of the rain clouds drifted off. The moon returned and Joe could see Dion as clearly as if they were inside. He found his old friend staring at him, so he stared back. For quite a while, neither of them said a word, but Joe felt a whole conversation pass between them nonetheless. He was relieved, and he knew Dion was too, to finally get on with it.

Dion took a swig of the rotgut rum, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “How'd you know it was me?”

Joe said, “Because I knew it wasn't me.”

“Could've been my brother.”

“May he rest in peace,” Joe said, “but your brother wasn't smart enough to double-cross a street.”

Dion nodded and looked down at his shoes for a bit. “It'd be a blessing.”

“What's that?”

“Dying.” Dion looked at him. “I got my brother killed, Joe. You know what living with that's like?”

“I have some idea.”

“How could you?”

“Trust me,” Joe said. “I do.”

“He was older than me by two years,” Dion said, “but I was the older brother, get me? I was supposed to look out for him. 'Member when we all first started palling around, knocking over newsstands, Paolo and me had that other little brother, called him Seppi?”

Joe nodded. Funny, he hadn't thought of the kid in years. “Got the polio.”

Dion nodded. “Died, he was eight? My mother was never right again after that. I said to Paolo at the time, you know, we couldn't do nothing to save Seppi; that was just God and God gets his way. But each other?” He twisted his thumbs together, raised his fists to his lips. “We would protect each other.”

Behind them the shack thumped with bodies and bass. In front of them mosquitoes rose off the swamp like claps of dust and found the moonlight.

“So what now? You requested me from prison. You had them find me in Montreal and pull me all the way down here, give me a good living. And for what?”

“Why'd you do it?” Joe asked.

“Because he asked me to.”

“Albert?” Joe whispered.

“Who else?”

Joe closed his eyes for a moment. He reminded himself to breathe slowly. “He asked you to rat us all out?”

“Yeah.”

“He pay you?”

“Fuck no. He offered, but I wouldn't take his fucking money. Fuck him.”

“You still work for him?”

“No.”

“Why would you tell the truth, D?”

Dion removed a switchblade from his boot. He placed it on the small table between them and followed it with two .38 long-barrels and one .32 snub-nose. He added a lead sap and brass knuckles, then wiped his hands clean of them and showed his palms to Joe.

“After I'm gone,” he said, “ask around Ybor about a guy named Brucie Blum. You'll see him down around Sixth Avenue sometimes. He walks funny, talks funny, has no idea he used to be big noise. He used to work for Albert. Just six months ago. Big hit with the ladies, had himself some nice suits. Now he shuffles around with a cup, begging for change, pisses himself, can't tie his own fucking shoes. Last thing he did when he was still big noise? He come up to me in a blind pig over on Palm? He says, ‘Albert needs to talk to you. Or else, see.' So I chose ‘or else' and beat his fucking head in. So, no, I don't work for Albert no more. It was a onetime job. Just ask Brucie Blum.”

Joe sipped the awful rum and said nothing.

“You going to do it yourself or get someone else to do it?”

Joe met his eyes. “I'll kill you myself.”

“Okay.”

“If I kill you.”

“I'd appreciate you make up your mind about it, one way or the other.”

“Don't much give a shit what you'd appreciate, D.”

Now it was Dion's time to be silent. The thumps and the bass grew softer behind them. More and more cars left the grounds and headed back up the mud path toward the cigar factory.

“My father's gone,” Joe said eventually. “Emma's dead. Your brother's dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you're one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?”

Dion stared at him, the tears rolling down his fat face like beads.

“So you didn't betray me for money,” Joe said. “So why then?”

“You were gonna get us all killed,” he said eventually, sucking air up from the floor. “The girl. You weren't yourself. Even that day at the bank. You were gonna get us into something we couldn't get out of. And my brother would have been the one to die, because he was slow, Joe. He wasn't us. I figured, I figured . . .” He sucked in a few more breaths. “I figured I'd get us all off the street for a year. That was the deal. Albert knew a judge. We were all going to get a year, that's why we never pulled guns during the job. One year. Long enough for Albert's girl to forget you and maybe you'd forget her.”

“Jesus,” Joe said. “All this because I fell for the man's girlfriend?”

“You and Albert were both bugs when it came to her. You couldn't see it, but once she came into the picture, you were
gone
. And I'll never understand it. She was no different than a million dames.”

“No,” Joe said, “she was.”

“
How?
What didn't I see?”

Joe finished the rest of his rum. “Before I met her? I didn't realize there was this bullet hole right in the center of me.” He tapped his chest. “Right here. Didn't realize it until she came along and filled it. Now she's dead and the hole's back. But it's grown to the size of a milk bottle. And it keeps growing. And I just want her to come back from the dead and fill it.”

Dion stared at him as the tears dried on his face. “From the outside looking in, Joe? She
was
the hole.”

B
ack at the hotel, the night manager came from behind the desk and handed Joe a series of messages. They were all calls from Maso.

“Do you have a twenty-four operator?” Joe asked him.

“Of course, sir.”

When he got to his room, he called down and the operator patched him through. The phone rang on the North Shore of Boston and Maso answered it. Joe had a cigarette and told him all about the long day.

“A ship?” Maso said. “They want you to hit a ship?”

“Navy ship,” Joe said. “Yeah.”

“What about the other thing? You get your answer?”

“I got my answer.”

“And?”

“It wasn't Dion ratted me out.” Joe removed his shirt, dropped it to the floor. “It was his brother.”