Live by Night (19 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Boom

T
he Circulo Cubano was the most recent of Ybor's social clubs. The Spaniards had built the first, Centro Español, on Seventh Avenue back in the 1890s. At the turn of the century, a group of northern Spaniards had splintered from the Centro Español to form Centro Asturiano on the corner of Ninth and Nebraska.

The Italian Club was a couple blocks down Seventh from the Centro Español, both addresses prime Ybor real estate. The Cubans, though, in keeping with their lowly status in the community, had to settle for a far less fashionable block. The Circulo Cubano sat on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Across the street was a seamstress and a pharmacist, both marginally respectable, but next door was Silvana Padilla's whorehouse, which catered to the cigar workers, not the managers, so knife fights were common and the whores were often sick and unkempt.

As Dion and Joe pulled to the curb, a whore in last night's wrinkled dress came out of an alley two doors up. She walked past them, smoothing her flounces and looking broken and very old and in need of a drink. Joe guessed she was about eighteen. The guy who came out of the alley after her wore a suit and a white skimmer and walked in the opposite direction, whistling, and Joe had the irrational urge to get out of the car, chase the guy down, and bang his head off one of the brick buildings lining Fourteenth. Bang it until blood rushed out of his ears.

“We own that?” Joe indicated the whorehouse with a tilt of his chin.

“We own a piece.”

“Then our piece says the girls don't do alley work.”

Dion looked at him to be sure he was serious. “Fine. I'll look into it, Father Joe. Can we concentrate on the issue at hand?”

“I'm concentrating.” Joe checked his tie in the rearview mirror and got out of the car. They walked up a sidewalk already so hot at eight in the morning he felt it in the soles of his feet even though he wore good shoes. The heat made it harder to think. And Joe needed to think. Plenty of other guys were tougher, braver, and better with a gun, but he'd match wits with any man and feel he had a fighting chance. It would help, though, if someone dropped by to shut off the fucking heat.

Concentrate. Concentrate. You are about to be presented with a problem that you have to fix. How do you relieve the U.S. Navy of sixty crates of weaponry without them killing or maiming you?

As they walked up the steps of the Circulo Cubano a woman came out the front door to greet them.

The truth was, Joe did have an idea about how to remove the weapons, but now it went right out of his head because he was looking at the woman and she was looking at him, recognition blossoming. It was the woman he'd seen on the train platform yesterday, the one with skin the color of brass and long thick hair as black as anything Joe had ever seen except, perhaps, her eyes, which were just as dark and locked on him as he approached.

“Senor Coughlin?” She held out a hand.

“Yes.” He shook her hand.

“Graciela Corrales.” She slipped her hand out of his. “You're late.”

She led them inside across a black and white tile floor to a white marble staircase. It was much cooler in here, the high ceilings and dark wood paneling and all the tile and marble managing to keep the heat at bay for a few hours longer.

Graciela Corrales spoke with her back to Joe and Dion. “You are from Boston, yes?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Do all men from Boston leer at women on train platforms?”

“We try to stop short of making a career out of it.”

She looked back over her shoulder at them. “It's very rude.”

Dion said, “I'm originally from Italy.”

“Another rude place.” She led them through a ballroom at the top of the stairs, pictures on the wall of various groups of Cubans gathered in this very room. Some of the shots were posed, others catching the feel of the dance nights in full bloom, arms flung in the air, hips cocked, skirts twirling. They moved quickly, but Joe was pretty sure he saw Graciela in one of the photos. He couldn't be certain because the woman in the photo was laughing, with her head thrown back, and her hair down, and he couldn't imagine this woman with her hair down.

Past the ballroom was a billiards parlor, Joe starting to think some Cubans lived pretty well, and past the billiards parlor was a library with heavy white curtains and four wooden chairs. The man waiting for them approached with a broad smile and a vigorous handshake.

Esteban. He shook their hands as if they hadn't met last night.

“Esteban Suarez, gentlemen. Good of you to come. Sit, sit.”

They took their seats.

Dion said, “Are there two of you?”

“I'm sorry?”

“We spent an hour with you last night. You shake our hands like we're strangers.”

“Well, last night you met the owner of El Vedado Tropicale. This morning you meet the recording secretary of Circulo Cubano.” He smiled as if he were a teacher humoring two schoolchildren who'd likely repeat the grade. “Anyway,” he said, “thank you for your help.”

Joe and Dion nodded but said nothing.

“I have thirty men,” Esteban said, “but I estimate I'll need thirty more. How many can you—”

Joe said, “We're not committing any men. We're not
committing
to anything.”

“No?” Graciela looked at Esteban. “I'm confused.”

“We've come to hear you out,” Joe said. “Whether we get involved from that point remains to be seen.”

Graciela took her seat beside Esteban. “Please don't act like you have a choice. You're gangsters who depend on a product supplied by one man and one man only. If you refuse us, your supply dries up.”

“In which case,” Joe said, “we go to war. And we'll win, because we've got numbers and, Esteban, you don't. I've looked into it. You want me to risk my life against the United States military? I'll take my chances against a few dozen Cubans on the streets of Tampa. At least I know what I'll be fighting for.”

“Profit,” Graciela said.

Joe said, “A way to make a living.”

“A criminal way.”

“What do you do?” He leaned forward, his eyes scanning the room. “Sit around here, counting your Oriental rugs?”

“I roll cigars, Mr. Coughlin, at La Trocha. I sit in a wooden chair and do this from ten every morning until eight every evening. When you leered at me on the platform yesterday—”

“I didn't
leer
at you.”

“—that was my first day off in two weeks. And when I'm not working, I volunteer here.” She gave him a bitter smile. “So don't let the pretty dress fool you.”

The dress was even more threadbare than the one she'd worn yesterday. It was cotton with a gypsy girdle straddling a flounced skirt, at least a year out of style, maybe two, washed and worn so many times it had traded its original color for something not-quite-white, not-quite-tan.

“Donations paid for this club,” Esteban said smoothly. “Its doors are kept open the same way. When Cubans go out on a Friday night, they want to go to a place where they can dress up, a place that makes them feel like they are back in Havana, a place with style. Pizzazz, yes?” He snapped his fingers. “In here, nobody calls us spics or mud men. We are free to speak our language and sing our songs and recite our poetry.”

“Well, that's nice. Why don't you tell me why I should poetically raid a navy transport ship on your behalf rather than just overthrow your whole organization?”

Graciela opened her mouth at that, eyes aflame, but Esteban stopped her with a hand to her knee. “You're correct—you could probably overthrow my operation. But what would you get but a few buildings? My supply routes, my contacts in Havana, all the people I work with in Cuba—they would never work with you. So, do you really want to kill the golden goose for some buildings and a few old cases of rum?”

Joe met his smile with one of his own. They were starting to understand each other. They didn't respect each other yet, but the possibility was there.

Joe jerked his thumb behind him. “You take those photos in the hallway?”

“Most of them.”

“What
don't
you do, Esteban?”

Esteban removed his hand from Graciela's knee and sat back. “Do you know much about Cuban politics, Mr. Coughlin?”

“No,” Joe said, “and I don't need to. It won't help me get this job done.”

Esteban crossed his ankles. “How about Nicaragua?”

“We put down a rebellion there a few years back, if I remember right.”

“That's where the weapons are going,” Graciela said. “And there was no rebellion. Your country occupies theirs just like they occupy mine when they see fit.”

“Take it up with the Platt Amendment.”

That put a rise in one of her eyebrows. “An educated gangster?”

“I'm not a gangster, I'm an outlaw,” he said, although he wasn't sure that was true anymore. “And there's not much else to do where I've spent the last two years but read. So why's the navy running guns to Nicaragua?”

“They've opened a military training school there,” Esteban said. “To train the armies and police of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama, of course, how to best remind the peasants of their place.”

Joe said, “So you're going to steal weapons from the U.S. Navy and reapportion them to Nicaraguan rebels?”

“Nicaragua is not my fight,” Esteban said.

“So you're going to arm Cuban rebels.”

A nod. “Machado is no president. He is a common thief with a gun.”

“So you'll steal from our military to overthrow your military?”

Esteban gave that a small tip of his head.

Graciela said, “Does it bother you?”

“Don't mean shit to me.” Joe looked over at Dion. “Bother you?”

Dion asked Graciela, “You ever think if you people could police yourselves, maybe pick a leader who didn't loot you six ways from Sunday five minutes after getting sworn in, we wouldn't have to keep occupying you?”

Graciela fixed him in a flat stare. “I think if we didn't have a cash crop you wanted for yourselves, you'd have never heard of Cuba.”

Dion looked over at Joe. “What do I care? Let's hear this plan.”

Joe turned to Esteban. “You do
have
a plan, don't you?”

Esteban's eyes registered offense for the first time. “We have a man who will be calling on the boat tonight. He'll cause a diversion in a forward compartment and—”

“What kind of diversion?” Dion asked.

“A fire. When they go to put it out, we'll go down to the hold and pull out the weapons.”

“The hold will be locked.”

Esteban gave them a confident smile. “We have bolt cutters for that.”

“You've seen the lock?”

“It's been described to me.”

Dion leaned forward. “But you don't know what kind of material it's made of. It could be stronger than your bolt cutters.”

“Then we will shoot it.”

“Which will alert the people fighting the fire,” Joe said. “And probably get somebody killed by a ricochet.”

“We will move fast.”

“How fast can anyone move with sixty boxes of rifles and grenades?”

“We'll have thirty men. Thirty more men, if you provide them.”

“They'll have three hundred,” Joe said.

“But they won't be three hundred
Cubanos
. The American soldier fights for his own pride. The
Cubano
fights for his country.”

“Jesus,” Joe said.

Esteban's smile got even more smug. “You doubt our bravery?”

“No,” Joe said. “I doubt your intelligence.”

“I'm not afraid to die,” Esteban said.

“I am.” Joe lit a cigarette. “And if I wasn't, I'd like to die for a better reason than this. It takes two guys to lift a crate of rifles. That means sixty guys would have to make two trips onto a burning naval ship. And you think this is possible?”

“We only learned about the ship two days ago,” Graciela said. “If we had more time we could have more men and a better plan, but that ship leaves tomorrow.”

“Doesn't have to,” Joe said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you can get a guy on the ship.”

“Yes.”

“That mean you already got an inside guy on there?”

“Why?”

“Jesus, because I fucking asked you, all right, Esteban? Do you have one of the sailors on your payroll or not?”

“We do,” Graciela said.

“What're his duties?”

“Engine room.”

“What was he going to do for you?”

“Cause an engine malfunction.”

“So your outside guy, he's a mechanic?”

A pair of nods.

“He comes in to fix the engine, starts the fire, you raid the weapons hold.”

Esteban said, “Yes.”

“As plans go, it's not half bad,” Joe said.

“Thank you.”

“Don't thank me. If half a plan isn't bad, it means the other half is. When were you going to do this?”

“Tonight,” Esteban said. “Ten o'clock. The moon's supposed to be quite weak.”

Joe said, “Middle of the night, more like three in the morning, would be ideal. Most everyone will be asleep. No heroes to worry about, few witnesses. That's the only chance I see of your man making it back off that boat.” He laced his hands behind his head, gave it a bit more thought. “Your mechanic, he Cuban?”

“Yes.”

“How dark?”

Esteban said, “I don't see—”

“Does he look more like you or more like her?”

“He's very light-skinned.”

“So he could pass for Spanish.”

Esteban looked at Graciela, then back at Joe. “Certainly.”