Live by Night (25 page)

“Thanks.”

He gave her a flourish and a bow and fell into her. She shrieked and swatted at his head and helped him right himself. They were both laughing and out of breath when they staggered to a table.

“We will never be lovers,” she said.

“Why's that?”

“We love other people.”

“Well, mine's dead.”

“Mine may as well be.”

“Oh.”

She shook her head several times, a reaction to the alcohol. “So we love ghosts.”

“Yes.”

“Which makes us ghosts.”

“You're drunk,” he said.

She laughed and pointed across the table. “
You're
drunk.”

“No argument.”

“We will not be lovers.”

“You said that.”

T
he first time they made love in her room above the café it was like a car crash. They mashed each other's bones and fell off the bed and toppled a chair and when he entered her, she sank her teeth into his shoulder so hard she drew blood. It was over in the time it took to dry a dish.

The second time, half an hour later, she poured rum onto his chest and licked it off and he returned the favor and they took their time and learned each other's rhythms. She had said no kissing, but that went the way of their not being lovers in the first place. They tested slow ones and hard ones, kisses with nips of the lips, kisses in which only their tongues touched.

What surprised him was how much fun they had. Joe had had sex with seven women in his life, but he'd only made love, as he understood the definition, with Emma. And while their sex had been reckless and occasionally inspired, Emma had always held a part of herself in reserve. He would catch her watching them have sex while they were having it. And afterward, she always withdrew even further into the locked box of herself.

Graciela reserved nothing. This left a high likelihood for injury—she pulled at his hair, she gripped his neck so hard with her cigar roller hands he half-worried she was going to snap it, she sank her teeth into skin and muscle and bone. But it was all part of her enveloping him, pushing the act to the edge of something that, to Joe, resembled vanishing, as if he'd wake up in the morning alone with her dissolved into his body or vice versa.

When he did wake that morning, he smiled at the foolishness of the notion. She slept on her side, with her back to him, her hair gone wild and overflowing on the pillow and headboard. He wondered if he should slide out of bed, grab his clothes, and get gone before the inevitable discussion of too much alcohol and muddy thinking. Before the regret cemented. Instead, he kissed her shoulder very lightly, and she rolled his way in a rush. She covered him. And regret, he decided, would have to wait for another day.

I
t will be a professional arrangement,” she explained to him over breakfast in the café downstairs.

“How's that?” He ate a piece of toast. He couldn't stop smiling like an idiot.

“We will fill this”—she was smiling too as she searched for the word—“need for each other until such time as—”

“ ‘Such time'?” he said. “That tutor taught you well.”

She leaned back in her chair. “My English is very good.”

“I agree, I agree. Outside of using
dangered
when you meant
endangered,
it's pretty flawless.”

She grew an inch in her chair. “Thank you.”

He continued to smile like an idiot. “My pleasure. So we fill each other's, um, need until when?”

“Until I return to Cuba to be with my husband.”

“And me?”

“You?” She speared a piece of fried egg.

“Yeah. You get to return to a husband. What do I get?”

“You get to become king of Tampa.”

“Prince,” he said.

“Prince Joseph,” she said. “It's not bad, but I'm afraid it doesn't quite fit you. And shouldn't a prince be benevolent?”

“As opposed to?”

“A gangster who is only out for himself.”

“And his gang.”

“And his gang.”

“Which is a type of benevolence.”

She gave him a look somewhere between frustration and disgust. “Are you a prince or a gangster?”

“I don't know. I like to think of myself as an outlaw, but I'm not sure that's any more than a fantasy now.”

“Well, you be my outlaw prince until I return home. How is that?”

“I would love to be your outlaw prince. What are my duties?”

“You must give back.”

“Okay.” She could have asked for his pancreas at this point and he would have said, “Fine.” He looked across the table at her. “Where do we start?”

“Manny.” She held him in dark eyes that were suddenly serious.

“He had a family,” Joe said. “Wife and three daughters.”

“You remember.”

“Of course I remember.”

“You said you didn't care whether he lived or died.”

“I was exaggerating a little bit.”

“Will you take care of his family?”

“For how long?”

“For life,” she said, as if it were a perfectly logical answer. “He gave his life for you.”

He shook his head. “With all due respect, he gave his life for you. You and your cause.”

“So . . .” She held a piece of toast just below her chin.

“So,” he said, “on behalf of your cause, I would be happy to send a bag of money over to the Bustamente family just as soon as I have a bag of money. Does that please you?”

She smiled at him as she bit into her toast. “It pleases me.”

“Then consider it done. By the way, anyone ever call you anything but Graciela?”

“What would they call me?”

“I dunno. Gracie?”

She made a face like she'd sat on a hot coal.

“Grazi?”

Another face.

“Ella?” he tried.

“Why would anyone do such a thing? Graciela is the name my parents gave me.”

“My parents gave me a name too.”

“But you cut it in half.”

“It's Joe,” he said. “Like José.”

“I know what it means,” she said as she finished her meal. “But José means Joseph. It does not mean Joe. You should be called Joseph.”

“You sound like my father. He would only call me Joseph.”

“Because that's your name,” she said. “You eat very slowly, like a bird.”

“I've heard that.”

Her eyes rose at something behind him and he turned in his chair to see Albert White walk through the back door. He hadn't aged a day, though he was softer than Joe remembered, a banker's paunch beginning to form over his belt. He still favored white suits and white hats and white spats. Still had that saunter that suggested the world was a playground built to amuse him. He walked in with Bones and Brenny Loomis and picked up a chair as he came. His boys followed suit, and they put the chairs down at Joe's table and sat in them—Albert beside Joe, Loomis and Bones flanking Graciela, their impassive faces fixed on Joe.

“What's it been?” Albert said. “A little over two years?”

“Two and a half,” Joe said and sipped his coffee.

“If you say so,” Albert said. “You're the one who went to prison, and if there's one thing I know about convicts it's that they count days real keen.” He reached over Joe's arm and plucked a sausage off his plate, started eating it like it was a chicken leg. “Why didn't you go for your heater?”

“Maybe I'm not carrying.”

Albert said, “No, truly.”

“I figure you're a businessman, Albert, and this place is a bit public for a gunfight.”

“I disagree.” Albert gave the place the once-over. “Looks perfectly acceptable to me. Good lighting, nice sight lines, not too much clutter.”

The café owner, a nervous Cuban woman in her fifties, looked even more nervous. She could read the energy between the men and she wanted that energy to leave through the windows or leave through the door but leave soon. An older couple sat at the counter by her and they were oblivious, arguing over whether to see a flicker tonight at Tampa Theatre or catch Tito Broca's set at the Tropicale.

Otherwise, the place was empty.

Joe checked on Graciela. Her eyes were a fair bit wider than usual, and a vein he'd never seen before had appeared, throbbing, in the center of her throat, but otherwise she seemed calm, hands as steady as her breathing.

Albert took another bite of sausage and leaned toward her. “What's your name, hon'?”

“Graciela.”

“You a light nigger or a dark spic? I can't tell.”

She smiled at him. “I'm from Austria. Isn't it obvious?”

Albert roared. He slapped his thigh and slapped the table and even the oblivious old couple looked over.

“Oh, that's a good one.” He said to Loomis and Bones, “Austria.”

They didn't get it.

“Austria!” he said, thrusting both hands out at them, the sausage still dangling from one. He sighed. “Forget it.” He turned back. “So Graciela from Austria, what's your full name?”

“Graciela Dominga Maela Corrales.”

Albert whistled. “That's quite a mouthful, but I bet you have plenty of experience with mouthfuls, don't you, hon'?”

“Don't,” Joe said. “Just . . . Albert? Don't. Leave her out of this.”

Albert turned back to Joe as he chewed the last of the sausage. “Past experience would suggest I'm not good at that, Joe.”

Joe nodded. “What do you want here?”

“I want to know why you didn't learn anything in prison. Too busy taking it up the ass? You get out, come down here, and in two days you try to muscle me? How fucking stupid they make you in there, Joe?”

“Maybe I was just trying to get your attention,” Joe said.

“Then you were a smashing success,” Albert said. “Today we started hearing back from my bars, my restaurants, my pool halls, every speak I got tucked away from here to Sarasota that they don't pay me anymore. They pay you. So naturally I went to talk to Esteban Suarez, and he's suddenly got more armed guards than the U.S. Mint. Can't be bothered to meet with me. You think you and a gang of wops and, what, niggers I hear?”

“Cubans.”

Albert helped himself to a piece of Joe's toast. “You think you're going to push me out?”

Joe nodded. “I think I did, Albert.”

Albert shook his head. “Soon as you're dead, the Suarezes will fall in line and you can be damn sure the dealers will.”

“If you wanted me dead, you would have done it. You came to negotiate.”

Albert shook his head. “I do want you dead and there's no negotiation. I just wanted you to see that I've changed. I've mellowed. We're going to walk out the back door and leave the girl behind. Won't touch a hair on her head, though, Lord knows, she could spare it.” Albert stood. He buttoned his suit coat over his softening belly. He straightened the brim of his hat. “You make a fuss, we take her with us, kill you both.”

“That's the proposition?”

“That's it.”

Joe nodded. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. He smoothed it. He looked up at Albert and began reading the names listed there. “Pete McCafferty, Dave Kerrigan, Gerard Mueler, Dick Kipper, Fergus Dempsey, Archibald—”

Albert pulled the list from Joe's fingers, read the rest of it.

“You can't find them, can you, Albert? All your best soldiers, and they're not answering their phones or their doorbells. You keep telling yourself it's a coincidence, but you know that's bullshit. We got to them. Every one of them. And, Albert, I hate to tell you this, but they're not coming back to you.”

Albert chuckled, but his normally ruddy face was now the white of an elephant tusk. He looked at Bones and Loomis and chuckled some more. Bones chuckled along with him, but Loomis looked sick.

“While we're on the subject of people in your organization,” Joe said, “how'd you know where to find me?”

Albert glanced at Graciela, a little bit of color returning to his face. “You're simple, Joe—just follow the pussy.”

Graciela's jaw tightened but she said nothing.

“It's a good line, I guess,” Joe said, “but unless you knew where to find me last night—and you didn't, because nobody did—then you wouldn't have been able to tail me here.”

“You got me.” Albert held up his hands. “I guess I have other methods.”

“Like a guy inside my organization?”

The smile slid through Albert's eyes before he blinked it away.

“Same guy who told you to take me in the café, not on the street?”

No smile in Albert's eyes anymore. They turned flatter than pennies.

“He tell you if you took me in the café, I wouldn't put up a fight because of the girl? Tell you I'd even take you to a bag of cash I stashed in a flop over in Hyde Park?”

Brendan Loomis said, “Shoot him, boss. Shoot him now.”

Joe said, “You should have shot me coming through the door.”

“Who says I won't?”

“I do,” Dion said, coming up behind Loomis and Bones, a long-barrel .38 pointed at each of them. Sal Urso entered through the front door and Lefty Downer came in behind Sal, both of them wearing trench coats on a cloudless day.

The café owner and the couple at the counter were officially rattled now. The old man kept patting his chest. The café owner thumbed her rosary beads, her lips moving frantically.

Joe asked Graciela, “Could you go tell them we won't hurt them?”

She nodded and got up from the table.

Albert said to Dion, “So betrayal's your defining personality trait, eh, fat boy?”

“Only once, you dandy fuck,” Dion said. “Shoulda thought long and hard about what I did to your boy Blum last year before you bought my bullshit this time around.”