Live by Night (20 page)

“Why is this important?” Graciela asked.

“Because after what we're about to do to the U.S. Navy, they're going to remember him. And they're going to hunt him.”

Graciela said, “And what are we going to do to the U.S. Navy?”

“Blow a hole in that ship, for starters.”

T
he bomb wasn't a box of nails and steel washers they bought for short money off a street-corner anarchist. It was an object of much more refinement and precision. Or so they were told.

One of the bartenders at a Pescatore speakeasy on Central Avenue, over in St. Petersburg, guy named Sheldon Boudre, had spent a fair portion of his thirties defusing bombs for the marines. Back in '15, he'd lost a leg in Haiti because of faulty communication equipment during the occupation of Port-au-Prince and he was still irate about it. He made them a honey of an explosive device—a steel square the size of a child's shoe box. He told Joe and Dion he'd packed it with ball bearings, brass doorknobs, and enough gunpowder to punch a tunnel through the Washington Monument.

“Make sure you put this directly under the engine.” Sheldon pushed the bomb, wrapped in brown paper, across the bar to them.

“We're not trying to just blow up an engine,” Joe said. “We want to damage the hull.”

Sheldon sucked his top row of false teeth back and forth against his gums, his eyes on the bar, and Joe realized he'd insulted the man. He waited him out.

“What do you think's going to happen,” Sheldon said, “when an engine the size of a fucking Studebaker blows through the hull and into Hillsborough Bay?”

“But we don't want to blow up the whole port,” Dion reminded him.

“That's the beauty of her.” Sheldon patted the package. “She's focused. She ain't scattering all about on you. You just don't want to be in front of her when she goes.”

“How volatile is, um, she?” Joe asked.

Sheldon's eyes brimmed. “Hit her with a hammer all day, she'll forgive you.” He stroked the brown paper wrapping like it was the spine of a cat. “Throw her in the air, you don't even have to step out of the way when she lands.”

He nodded to himself several times, his lips still moving, and Joe and Dion exchanged a look. If this guy was less than sane, they were about to put a bomb of his making in their car and drive it across Tampa Bay.

Sheldon held up a finger. “There is one small caveat.”

“One small what?”

“Detail you should know about.”

“And that is?”

He gave them an apologetic smile. “Whoever lights her better be a runner.”

T
he drive from St. Petersburg to Ybor was twenty-five miles, and Joe counted every yard of it. Every bump, every lurch of the car. Every rattle of the chassis became the sound of his immediate death. He and Dion never discussed the fear because they didn't have to. It filled their eyes, filled the car, turned their sweat metallic. They looked straight ahead mostly, occasionally off to the bay as they crossed the Gandy Bridge and the strip of shoreline on either side of them was sharp white against the dead blue water. Pelicans and egrets took flight from the rails. The pelicans often seized up in midflight and then fell from the sky as if they'd been shot. They'd plunge into the flat sea and swoop back out with contorting fish in their bills, open their mouths, and the fish, no matter what the size, vanished.

Dion hit a pothole, then a metal road bracket, then another pothole. Joe closed his eyes.

The sun flung itself against the windshield and breathed fire through the glass.

Dion reached the other side of the bridge, and the paved road gave way to a stretch of crushed shell and gravel, two lanes dropping to one, the pavement suddenly a patchwork of various grades and consistencies.

“I mean,” Dion said but said nothing else.

They bounced along for a block and then came to a standstill in the traffic and Joe had to fight the urge to bolt the car, abandon Dion, run away from this whole idea. Who in his right mind drove a fucking
bomb
from one point to another? Who?

An insane person. Guy with a death wish. Someone who thought happiness was a lie told to keep you docile. But Joe had seen happiness; he'd known it. And now he was risking any possibility of ever feeling it again to transport an explosive powerful enough to pitch a thirty-ton engine through a steel-plated hull.

There'd be nothing left of him to recover. No car, no clothes. His thirty teeth would sprinkle the bay like pennies flung into a fountain. Be lucky if they found a knuckle to mail back to the family plot in Cedar Grove.

The last mile was the worst. They left Gandy and drove down a dirt road that ran parallel to some train tracks, the road sloughing to the right with the heat, creviced in all the wrong places. It smelled like mildew and things that had crawled and died in warm mud, and were left there until they fossilized. They entered a patch of high mangroves and soil pocked with puddles and sudden steep holes, and after another couple of minutes of bouncing through that terrain, they arrived at the shack of Daniel Desouza, one of the outfit's most reliable builders of concealment contraptions.

He'd fashioned them a toolbox with a false bottom. Per his instructions, he'd dirtied the toolbox down, gritted it to the point where it smelled not just of oil and grease and dirt but also of age. The tools he'd placed in it were top of the line, however, and well tended, some wrapped in oilskin, all recently cleaned and oiled.

As they stood by the kitchen table in his one-room shack, he showed them the release on the bottom of the box. His pregnant wife waddled around them, heading to the outhouse, and his two kids played on the floor with a pair of dolls that weren't much more than rags stitched together with a butcher's finesse. Joe noted one mattress on the floor for the kids, one for the adults, neither with a sheet or pillow. A mongrel dog wandered in and out, sniffing, and flies buzzed everywhere, mosquitoes too, while Daniel Desouza checked Sheldon's work for himself out of idle curiosity or sheer insanity, Joe couldn't tell anymore, numb to it by this point, standing there waiting to meet his Maker as Desouza poked a screwdriver into the bomb and his wife came back in and swatted at the dog. The kids started fighting over one of the rag dolls, screeching all shrill until Desouza shot his wife a look. She left the dog alone and started clouting the kids, slapping them all over their faces and necks.

The kids wailed with shock and indignation.

“You boys got you a nice piece of craft right here, what it is,” Desouza said. “Gonna make itself a statement.”

The younger of his two children, a boy of five or so, stopped crying. He'd been wailing his wail of stunned outrage, but when he stopped, he did so as if he'd snuffed out a match at the core of himself, and his face went blank. He picked one of his father's wrenches up off the floor and hit the dog in the side of the head with it. The dog snarled and looked like it might lunge for the boy, but then it thought better of it and scurried out of the shack.

“I'm a beat that dog or that boy to death,” Desouza said, his eyes never leaving the toolbox. “One of the two.”

J
oe met with their bomber, Manny Bustamente, in the library of the Circulo Cubano, where everyone but Joe smoked a cigar, even Graciela. Out on the streets, it was the same thing—nine- and ten-year-old kids walking around with stogies in their mouths the size of their legs. Every time Joe lit one of his puny Murads, he felt like the whole city laughed at him, but cigars gave him a headache. Looking around the library that night, though, at the brown blanket of smoke that hung above their heads, he assumed he was going to have to get used to headaches.

Manny Bustamente had been a civil engineer in Havana. Unfortunately his son had been part of the Student Federation at the University of Havana, which spoke out against the Machado regime. Machado closed the university and abolished the federation. One day several men in army uniforms came to Manny Bustamente's house a few minutes after sunup. They put his son on his knees in the kitchen and shot him in the face and then they shot Manny's wife when she called them animals. Manny was sent to prison. Upon his release, it was suggested to him that leaving the country would be an exceptional idea.

Manny told this to Joe in the library at ten o'clock that evening. It was, Joe assumed, a way to reassure him of Manny's devotion to his cause. Joe didn't question his devotion; he questioned his speed. Manny was five foot two and built like a bean pot. He breathed heavily after walking up a flight of stairs.

They were going over the layout of the ship. Manny had serviced the engine when it had first arrived in port.

Dion asked why the navy didn't have its own engineers.

“They do,” Manny said. “But if they can get a
y
. . .
especialista
to look at these old engines, they do. This ship is twenty-five years old. It was built as a . . . ” He snapped his fingers and spoke quickly to Graciela in Spanish.

“A luxury liner,” she said to the room.

“Yes,” Manny said. He spoke to her again in rapid Spanish, a full paragraph of it. When he finished, she explained to them that the ship had been sold to the navy during the Great War and then turned into a hospital ship afterward. Recently it had been recommissioned as a transport ship with a crew of three hundred.

“Where's the engine room?” Joe asked.

Again Manny spoke to Graciela and she translated. It actually made things move a lot faster.

“Bottom of the ship, at the stern.”

He asked Manny, “If you're called to the ship in the middle of the night, who will greet you?”

He started to speak to Joe but then turned to Graciela and asked her a question.

“The police?” she said, frowning.

He shook his head, spoke again to her.

“Ah,” she said, “
veo, veo
,
sí
.” She turned to Joe. “He means the naval police.”

“The Shore Patrol,” Joe said, looking over at Dion. “You on top of that?”

Dion nodded. “On top of it? I'm ahead of you.”

“So you get past the Shore Patrol,” Joe said to Manny, “you get into the engine room. Where's the nearest sleeping berth?”

“One deck up and down the other end,” Manny said.

“So the only personnel near you are the two engineers?”

“Yes.”

“And how do you get them out of there?”

From over by the window, Esteban said, “We have it on good authority that the chief engineer is a drunk. If he even goes to the engine room to double-check our man's assessment, he won't stay.”

“What if he does, though?” Dion said.

Esteban shrugged. “They improvise.”

Joe shook his head. “We don't improvise.”

Manny surprised them all when he reached into his boot and came back with a one-shot derringer with a pearl handle. “I will take care of this man if he does not leave.”

Joe rolled his eyes at Dion, who was closer to Manny.

Dion said, “Give me that,” and snatched the derringer from Manny's hand.

“You ever shot anybody?” Joe said. “Ever kill a man?”

Manny sat back. “No.”

“Good. Because you're not starting tonight.”

Dion tossed the gun to Joe. He caught it and held it up before Manny. “I don't care who you kill,” he said and wondered if that were true, “but if they frisked you, they would have found this. Then they would have taken an extra hard look at your toolbox and found the bomb. Your primary job tonight, Manny? Is to not fuck this up. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes,” Manny said. “Yes.”

“If the chief engineer stays in that room, you repair the engine and walk away.”

Esteban came off the window. “No!”

“Yes,” Joe said. “Yes. This is an act of treason against the United States government. Do you comprehend that? I'm not doing it just so I can get caught and strung up at Leavenworth. If anything goes south, Manny, you walk the fuck back off that boat and we figure out another way. Do not—look at me, Manny—do
not
improvise.
¿Comprende?
”

Manny nodded eventually.

Joe indicated the bomb in the canvas bag at his feet. “This has a short, short fuse.”

“I understand this.” Manny blinked at a drop of sweat that fell from his eyebrow and then wiped the brow with the back of his hand. “I am fully committed to this event.”

Great, Joe thought, he's overweight
and
overheated.

“I appreciate that,” Joe said, catching Graciela's eyes for a moment, seeing the same concern in hers that probably lived in his. “But, Manny? You have to be committed to doing it
and
getting off that boat alive. I'm not saying this because I'm so swell and I care about you. I'm not and I don't. But if you're killed and they identify you as a Cuban national, the plan falls apart right there and then.”

Manny leaned forward, his cigar as thick as a hammer grip between his fingers. “I want freedom for my country and I want Machado dead and the United States to leave my lands. I have remarried, Mr. Coughlin. I have three niños, all under six years old. I have a wife I love, God forgive me, more than my wife who died. I'm old enough that I would rather live as a weak man than die a brave one.”

Joe gave him a grateful smile. “Then you're the guy I want delivering this bomb.”

T
he USS
Mercy
weighed ten thousand tons. It was a four-hundred-foot-long, fifty-two-foot-wide, plumb-bow displacement ship with two smokestacks and two masts. The mainmast sported a crow's nest that seemed to Joe like it belonged on a ship from another time, when brigands roamed the high seas. Two faded crosses were painted on the smokestacks, which confirmed her history as a hospital ship, as did the white of her paint. She looked worked over, creaky, but the white of her gleamed against the black water and the night sky.