Live by Night (21 page)

They were up on the catwalk above a grain silo at the end of McKay Street—Joe, Dion, Graciela, and Esteban, looking out at the ship moored at Pier 7. A dozen silos clustered there, sixty feet high, the last of the grain having been stored there this afternoon by a Cargill ship. The night watchman had been paid off, told to make sure he told the police tomorrow that it was Spaniards who tied him up, and then Dion knocked him out with two swings of a lead sap to make it look authentic.

Graciela asked Joe what he thought.

“Of what?”

“Our chances.” Graciela's cigar was long and thin. She blew rings over the rail of the catwalk and watched them float over the water.

“Honestly?” Joe said. “Slim to none.”

“Yet it's your plan.”

“And it's the best one I could think of.”

“It seems quite good.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She shook her head, though he thought he saw the smallest twitch of her lips. “It's a statement. If you played good guitar, I would tell you and still not like you.”

“Because I leered?”

“Because you are arrogant.”

“Oh.”

“Like all Americans.”

“And all Cubans are what?”

“Proud.”

He smiled. “According to the papers I've been reading, you're also lazy, quick to anger, incapable of saving money, and childish.”

“You think this is true?”

“No,” he said. “I think assumptions about an entire country or an entire people are pretty fucking stupid in general.”

She drew on her cigar and looked at him for a bit. Eventually, she turned to look out at the ship again.

The lights of the waterfront turned the lower edges of the sky a pale, chalky red. Beyond the channel, the city lay sleeping in the haze. Far off at the horizon line, thin bolts of lightning carved jagged white veins in the skin of the world. Their faint and sudden light would reveal swollen clouds as dark as plums massed out there like an enemy army. At one point, a small plane passed directly overhead, four lights in the sky, one small engine, a hundred yards above, possibly for a legitimate purpose, though it was hard to imagine what that could be at three in the morning. Not to mention, in the short time he'd been in Tampa, Joe had come across very little activity he'd describe as legitimate.

“Did you mean what you told Manny tonight, that it makes no difference to you whether he lives or dies?”

They could see him now, walking along the pier toward the ship, toolbox in hand.

Joe leaned his elbows on the rail. “Pretty much.”

“How does anyone become so callous?”

“Takes less practice than you'd think,” Joe said.

Manny stopped at the gangplank where two sailors of the Shore Patrol met him. He raised his arms while one of the SPs patted him down and the other opened the toolbox. He rifled through the top tray and then removed it and placed it on the pier.

“If this goes well,” Graciela said, “you'll take over rum distribution in Tampa.”

“In half of Florida, actually,” Joe said.

“You'll be powerful.”

“I guess.”

“Your arrogance will reach new heights then.”

“Well,” Joe said, “one can hope.”

The SP stopped frisking Manny and he lowered his hands, but then that sailor joined his partner and they both looked at something in the toolbox, started conferring, their heads lowered, one with his hand on the butt of his .45.

Joe looked down the parapet at Dion and Esteban. They were frozen, necks extended, eyes locked on that toolbox.

Now the SPs were ordering Manny to join them. He stepped in between them and looked down too. One of them pointed, and Manny reached down into the toolbox and came back with two pints of rum.

“Shit,” Graciela said. “Who told him to bribe them?”

“I didn't,” Esteban said.

“He's making up things on the fly,” Joe said. “This is fucking great. This is wonderful.”

Dion slapped the parapet.

“I didn't tell him to do this,” Esteban said.

“I specifically told him not to do this,” Joe said. “ ‘Don't improvise,' I said. You were wit—”

“They're taking it,” Graciela said.

Joe narrowed his eyes, saw each of the SPs put a bottle inside his tunic and step aside.

Manny closed his toolbox and walked up the gangplank.

For a moment, they were very quiet on the roof.

Then Dion said, “I think I just coughed up my own asshole.”

“It's working,” Graciela said.

“He got on,” Joe said. “He's still got to do his job and get back off.” He looked at his father's watch: 3
A.M.
on the nose.

He looked over at Dion, who read his thoughts. “I'd figure they started busting up that joint ten minutes ago.”

They waited. The metal of the catwalk was still warm from a day of baking in the August sun.

Five minutes later one of the SPs walked to a ringing phone on the deck. A few moments later, he came running back down the gangplank and slapped his partner's arm. The SPs ran a few yards along the pier to a scout car. They drove down the pier and turned left, headed into Ybor, to the club on Seventeenth where ten of Dion's guys were, at this moment, beating the shit out of about twenty sailors.

“So far”—Dion smiled at Joe—“admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“Everything's going like clockwork.”

“So far,” Joe said.

Beside him, Graciela drew on her cigar.

The sound reached them, the echo of a surprisingly dull thud. Didn't sound like much, but the catwalk swayed for a moment, and they all held out their arms as if they stood atop the same bicycle. The USS
Mercy
shuddered. The water around it rippled and small waves broke against the pier. Smoke as thick and gray as steel wool billowed from a hole in the hull the size of a piano.

The smoke grew thicker, darker, and after a few moments of staring at it, Joe could see a yellow ball blooming behind it, pulsing like a beating heart. He kept looking until he saw red flames mixed in with the yellow, but then both colors vanished behind the plumes of smoke, which was now the black of fresh tar. It filled the channel and blotted out the city beyond, blotted out the sky.

Dion laughed and Joe met his eyes and Dion kept laughing, shaking his head, and nodding at Joe.

Joe knew what the nod meant—
this
was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesmen of the world, the truck drivers and lawyers and bank tellers and carpenters and Realtors would never know. Moments in a world without nets—none to catch you and none to envelop you. Joe looked at Dion and recalled what he'd felt after the first time they'd knocked over that newsstand on Bowdoin Street when they were thirteen years old:
We will probably die young
.

But how many men, as they stepped into the night country of their own final hour and crossed dark fields toward the fog bank of whatever world lay beyond this one, could take one last look over their shoulders and say,
I once sabotaged a ten-thousand-ton transport ship
?

Joe met Dion's eyes again and chuckled.

“He never came back out.” Graciela stood beside him, looking at the ship, which was now almost completely obscured by the smoke.

Joe said nothing.

“Manny,” she said, though she didn't have to.

Joe nodded.

“Is he dead?”

“I don't know,” Joe said, but what he thought was: I certainly hope so.

Chapter Fifteen

His Daughter's Eyes

A
t dawn, the sailors off-loaded the weapons and placed them on the pier. The crates sat in the rising sun, beaded with dew that turned to steam as it evaporated. Several smaller boats arrived, and sailors got off them followed by officers, and they all took a look at the hole in the hull. Joe, Esteban, and Dion wandered among the crowd behind the cordons set up by the Tampa Police and heard that the ship had settled at the bottom of the bay and there was some question as to whether she could be salvaged. The navy was purportedly sending a crane on a barge down from Jacksonville to answer that question. As for the weapons, they were looking into getting a ship to Tampa that could handle the load. In the meantime, they'd have to stow them someplace.

Joe walked back off the pier. He met Graciela at a café on Ninth. They sat outdoors under a stone portico and watched a streetcar clack along the tracks in the center of the avenue and come to a stop in front of them. A few passengers got on, a few got off, and the streetcar rattled away again.

“Did you see any sign of him?” Graciela asked.

Joe shook his head. “But Dion's watching. And he put a couple of his guys in the crowd, so . . .” He shrugged and sipped his Cuban coffee. He'd been up all night and hadn't slept much the previous night, but as long as the Cuban coffee kept coming, he assumed he could stay awake for a week.

“What do they put in this stuff? Cocaine?”

Graciela said, “It's just coffee.”

“That's like saying vodka is just potato juice.” He finished it and returned the cup to the saucer. “Do you miss it?”

“Cuba?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “Very much.”

“Then why are you here?”

She looked off at the street as if she could see Havana on the other side of it. “You don't like the heat.”

“What?”

“You,” she said. “You are always waving your hand at the air, your hat. I see you make faces and look up at the sun, as if you want to tell it to set faster.”

“I didn't realize it was that obvious.”

“You're doing it now.”

She was right. He'd been waving his hat by the side of his head. “This kinda heat? Some people would say it's like living on the sun. I say it's like living
in
the sun. Christ. How do you people function down here?”

She leaned back in her chair, lovely brown neck arching against the wrought iron. “It can never get too warm for me.”

“Then you're insane.”

She laughed and he watched the laugh run up her throat. She closed her eyes. “So you hate the heat but you are here.”

“Yes.”

She opened her eyes, tilted her head, looked at him. “Why?”

He suspected—no, he knew—that what he'd felt for Emma was love. It was love. So the feeling Graciela Corrales stirred in him had to be lust. But a lust unlike any he'd ever encountered. Had he ever seen eyes that dark? There was something so languid in everything she did—from walking, to smoking her cigars, to picking up a pencil—that it was easy to imagine that languid motion in play as her body draped over his, took him inside her while she exhaled a long breath into his ear. The languor in her didn't resemble laziness but precision. Time didn't bend it; it bent time to uncoil as she desired.

No wonder the nuns had railed so vehemently against the sins of lust and covetousness. They could possess you surer than a cancer. Kill you twice as quick.

“Why?” he said, not even sure where he was in the conversation for a moment.

She was looking at him curiously. “Yes, why?”

“A job,” he said.

“I come for the same reason.”

“To roll cigars?”

She straightened in her chair and nodded. “The pay is much better than anything in Havana. I send it home to family, most of it. When my husband is released, we will decide where to live.”

“Oh,” Joe said, “you're married.”

“Yes.”

He saw a flash of triumph in her eyes, or did he imagine it?

“But your husband's in prison.”

Another nod. “But not for what you do.”

“What do I do?”

She waved at the air. “Little dirty crimes.”

“Oh, that's what I do.” He nodded. “I'd been wondering.”

“Adan fights for something bigger than himself.”

“What kinda sentence they hand out for that?”

Her face darkened, the joking over. “He was tortured to tell them who his accomplices were—myself and Esteban. But he did not tell them. No matter what they did to him.” Her jaw was extended, her eyes flashing in a way that reminded Joe of the slim bolts of lightning they'd seen last night. “I don't send money home to my family because I don't have a family. I send it to Adan's family so they can get him out of that shithole prison and home to me.”

Was it just lust he felt or something he hadn't been able to define yet? Maybe it was his exhaustion and two years in prison and the heat. Maybe so. Probably so. Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was drawn to a part of her he suspected was deeply broken, something frightened and angry and hopeful all at the same time. Something at her core that struck at something at his.

“He's a lucky man,” Joe said.

Her mouth opened before she realized there was nothing to retort to.

“A very lucky man.” Joe stood and placed some coins on the table. “Time to make that phone call.”

T
hey made the call from a phone in the back of a bankrupt cigar factory on the east side of Ybor. They sat on a dusty floor in the empty office and Joe dialed while Graciela took one last glance over the message he'd typed up last night around midnight.

“City desk,” the guy on the other end said, and Joe handed the phone to Graciela.

Graciela said, “I take responsibility for last night's triumph over American imperialism. You know of the bombing of the USS
Mercy
?”

Joe could hear the guy's voice. “Yes, yes, I do.”

“The United Peoples of Andalusia claim responsibility. We further pledge a direct attack on the sailors themselves and all American armed forces until Cuba is returned to its rightful owners, the people of España. Good-bye.”

“Wait, wait. The sailors. Tell me about the attack on the—”

“By the time I hang up this phone, they will already be dead.”

She hung up, looked at Joe.

“That should get things moving,” he said.

J
oe got back there in time to see them run the convoy trucks down the pier. The crew came off in groups of about fifty, moving fast, eyes scanning the rooftops.

The convoy trucks barreled off the pier one after another and then immediately split up, each truck carrying about twenty sailors, the first one heading east, the next heading southwest, the next north, and so on.

“You see any sign of Manny?” Joe asked Dion.

Dion gave him a grim nod and pointed, and Joe looked through the crowd and past the crates of weapons. There, on the edge of the pier, lay a canvas body bag tied off at the legs, the chest, and the neck. After a while, a white van arrived and picked up the corpse and drove it off the pier with a Shore Patrol escort.

Not long after that, the last convoy truck on the pier rumbled to life. It made a U-turn, then stopped, its gears grinding with the high pitch of gulls, and then it backed up to the crates. A sailor hopped out and opened its rear gate. The few sailors left on the USS
Mercy
started filing off then, all carrying BARs and most wearing sidearms. A chief warrant officer waited on the pier for them as they mustered by the gangplank.

Sal Urso, who worked in the central office of the Pescatore sports book in South Tampa, sidled up and handed Dion some keys.

Dion introduced him to Joe, and they shook hands.

Sal said, “She's about twenty yards behind us. Full tank of gas, uniforms on the seat.” He looked Dion up and down. “You weren't an easy fit, mister.”

Dion slapped the side of his head but not too hard. “What's it like out there?”

“The laws are everywhere. They're looking for Spaniards, though.”

“Not Cubans?”

Sal shook his head. “You got this city riled up, son.”

The last of the sailors had mustered and the chief was giving them orders, pointing at the crates.

“Time to move,” Joe said. “Good to meet you, Sal.”

“You too, sir. I'll see you there.”

They left the edge of the crowd and found the truck where Sal had said it would be. It was a two-ton flatbed with a steel bed and steel roll bars covered by a canvas tarp. They hopped up front, and Joe ground the shifter into first and they lurched out onto Nineteenth Street.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled over along the side of Route 41. There was a forest here, longleaf pines taller than Joe had imagined a tree could get and smaller slash and pond pines, all rising from a thick warren of overgrown palmetto and briars and scrub oak. By the smell of it, he guessed a swamp lay somewhere just east of them. Graciela was waiting for them by a tree that had snapped in half during a recent storm. She'd changed the dress she'd been wearing for a gaudy black net evening gown with zigzag hem. Imitation gold seed beads, black sequins, and a low neckline that exposed her cleavage and the edges of her brassiere cups completed the impression of a party girl who'd stayed out well past the end of the party and drifted, in the light of day, into a much crueler place.

Joe looked at her through the windshield and didn't get out of the truck. He could hear his own breathing.

“I can do it for you,” Dion said.

“No,” Joe said. “My plan, my responsibility.”

“You got no problem delegating other things.”

He turned and looked at Dion. “You saying I
want to
do this?”

“I seen the way you look at each other.” Dion shrugged. “Maybe she likes it rough. Maybe you do too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about—the way we look at each other? You keep your eyes on your work, not on her.”

“All due respect,” Dion said, “you too.”

Shit, Joe thought, as soon as a guy felt sure you weren't going to kill him, he sassed you.

Joe got out of the truck and Graciela watched him come. She'd already done some of the work herself—there was a tear in her dress by her left shoulder blade and light scratches on her left breast and she'd bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. As he approached, she dabbed at it with a handkerchief.

Dion got out of the truck on his side and they both looked over at him. He held up the uniform Sal Urso had left on the seat for him.

“Go about your business,” Dion said. “I'm gonna change.” He chuckled and walked to the back of the truck.

Graciela held out her right arm. “You don't have much time.”

Suddenly Joe didn't know how to take someone's hand. It seemed unnatural.

“You don't,” she said.

He reached out, took her hand in his. It was harder than any woman's hand he'd ever touched. The heels of the palm were rocks from rolling cigars all day, the slim fingers as strong as ivory.

“Now?” he asked her.

“Now would be best,” she said.

He gripped her wrist with his left hand and curled the fingers of his right into the flesh by her shoulder. He pulled his nails down her arm. At the elbow he broke off and took a breath because his head felt like it was filled with wet newspaper.

She snatched her wrist out of his grip and looked at the scratches on her arm. “You have to make them look real.”

“They look plenty real.”

She pointed at her biceps. “They're pink. And they stop at the elbow. They need to bleed,
bobo niño,
and go down to my hand. Yes? You remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Joe said. “It's
my
plan.”

“Then act like it.” She thrust her arm at him. “Dig and pull.”

Joe wasn't sure, but he thought he heard laughter coming from the back of the truck. He wrapped his hand firmly around her bicep this time and his fingernails sank into the faint tracks he'd already laid. Graciela wasn't quite as brave as her talk. Her eyes wiggled in their sockets and her flesh quivered.

“Shit. I'm sorry.”

“Hurry, hurry.”

She locked eyes with him and he pulled his hand down the inside of her arm, stripping the skin as he went, opening the seams in her flesh. As he continued on past her elbow, she hissed and turned her arm so that his nails plowed along her forearm and ended at her wrist.

When he dropped her hand, she slapped him with it.

“Christ,” he said, “I'm not doing it because I like it.”

“So you claim.” She slapped him again, this time across the lower jaw and the top of his neck.

“Hey! I can't pull up to a fucking guard shack with welts all over my face.”

“Then you better stop me,” she said and swung for him again.

He sidestepped this one because she'd telegraphed it for him and then he did what they'd agreed on—what had certainly seemed easier to discuss than to do until she'd hit him twice to get his blood up. The back of his hand connected with her cheek, all knuckle. Her upper body snapped to the side and her hair covered her face and she stayed that way for a moment, breathing hard. When she righted herself, her face had turned red and the skin around her right eye twitched. She spit into the palmetto bush on the side of the road.

She wouldn't look at him. “I have it from here.”

He wanted to say something but he couldn't think of what, so he walked around the front of the truck, Dion watching him from the passenger seat. He stopped as he opened the door and looked back at her. “I hated doing that.”

“And yet,” she said and spit onto the road, “it was your plan.”