Live by Night (33 page)
“What word?”
“Repent.”
She looked up at him. “Repent, repent, repent.”
“Give him time,” Joe said again, because he couldn't think of anything else to say.
W
ithin a few weeks, Loretta went back to wearing white. Her preaching continued to pack them in. She'd added a few new wrinkles, thoughâtricks, some people scoffedâspeaking in tongues, frothing at the mouth. And she spoke with twice the thunder and twice the volume.
Joe saw a picture of her in the paper one morning, preaching to a gathering of the General Council of the Assemblies of God in Lee County, and he didn't recognize her at first, even though she looked exactly the same.
P
resident Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act on the morning of March 23, 1933, legalizing the manufacture and sale of beer and wine with an alcohol content no greater than 3.2 percent. By the end of the year, FDR promised, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution would be a memory.
Joe met with Esteban at the Tropicale. Joe was uncharacteristically late, something that had been happening a lot lately because his father's watch had started to run behind. Last week it consistently lost five minutes a day. Now it was averaging ten, sometimes fifteen. Joe kept meaning to get it fixed, but that would mean releasing it from his possession for however long the repair took and, even though he knew it was an irrational reaction, he couldn't bear the thought of that.
When Joe entered the back office, Esteban was framing yet another photograph he'd taken on his last trip to Havana, this one of the opening night of Zoot, his new club in the Old City. He showed the photo to Joeâpretty much like all the others, drunk, well-dressed swells and their well-dressed wives or girlfriends or escorts, a dancing girl or two over by the band, everyone glassy-eyed and joyous. Joe barely glanced at it before giving the requisite whistle of appreciation and Esteban turned it facedown on the mat that awaited it on the glass. He poured them drinks and set them on the desk amid the frame pieces and set to work joining the pieces, the smell of the glue so strong it even overpowered the smell of tobacco in his study, something Joe would have assumed impossible.
“Smile,” he said at one point and raised his glass. “We are about to become extremely wealthy men.”
Joe said, “If Pescatore lets me go.”
“If he is reluctant,” Esteban said, “we will let him buy his way into a legitimate business.”
“He'll never come back out again.”
“He's old.”
“He has partners. Hell, he has sons.”
“I know all about his sonsâone's a pederast, one's an opium addict, and one beats his wife and all his girlfriends because he secretly likes men.”
“Yeah, but I don't think blackmail works on Maso. And his train gets in tomorrow.”
“That soon?”
“From what I hear.”
“Eh. I've been in business with his kind all my life. We'll manage him.” Esteban raised his glass again. “You're worth it.”
“Thank you,” Joe said, and this time he drank.
Esteban went back to work on the frame. “So smile.”
“I'm trying.”
“It's Graciela then.”
“Yes.”
“What about her?”
They'd decided not to tell anyone until she started to show. This morning, before she left for work, she pointed at the small cannonball protruding from under her dress and told him she was pretty sure the secret was going to get out today, one way or the other.
So it was with a surprisingly large relinquishing of a hidden weight that he said to Esteban, “She's pregnant.”
Esteban's eyes filled and he clapped his hands together and then came around the desk and hugged Joe. He slapped Joe's back several times and much harder than Joe would have guessed he could.
“Now,” he said, “you are a man.”
“Oh,” Joe said, “that's what it takes?”
“Not always, but in your case . . .” Esteban made a back-and-forth gesture with his hand and Joe threw a mock punch at him and Esteban stepped inside it and hugged him again. “I'm very happy for you, my friend.”
“Thank you.”
“Is she glowing?”
“You know what? She is. It's strange. I can't describe it. But, yeah, this
energy
comes off her in a different way.”
They drank a toast to fatherhood, an Ybor Friday night kicking up outside Esteban's shutters, past his lush green garden and tree lights and stone wall.
“Do you like it here?”
“What?” Joe said.
“When you arrived, you were so pale. You had that terrible prison haircut, and you talked so
fast
.”
Joe laughed, and Esteban laughed with him.
“Do you miss Boston?”
“I do,” Joe said because sometimes he missed it terribly.
“But this is your home now.”
Joe nodded, even though it surprised him to realize it. “I think so.”
“I know how you feel. I do not know the rest of Tampa. Even after all these years. But I know Ybor like I know Habana, and I'm not sure what I would do if I had to choose.”
“You think Machado willâ?”
“Machado's done. It may take some time. But he is finished. The Communists think they can replace him, but America would never allow it. My friends and I have a wonderful solution, a very moderate man, but I'm not sure anyone's ready for moderation these days.” He made a face. “Makes them think too much. Gives them headaches. People like sides, not subtleties.”
He lay the picture glass on the frame and placed the cork square on the back and applied more glue. He wiped off the excess with a small towel and stepped back to appraise his work. When he was satisfied, he took their empty glasses over to the bar and poured them each another drink.
He brought Joe his glass. “You heard about Loretta Figgis.”
Joe took the glass. “Someone see her walking on the Hillsborough River?”
Esteban stared at him, his head very still. “She killed herself.”
That stopped the drink halfway to Joe's mouth. “When?”
“Last night.”
“How?”
Esteban shook his head several times and moved behind his desk.
“Esteban, how?”
He looked out at his garden. “We have to assume she had returned to using heroin.”
“Okay . . .”
“Else, it would have been impossible.”
“Esteban,” Joe said.
“She cut off her genitalia, Joseph. Thenâ”
“Fuck,” Joe said. “Fuck no.”
“Then she cut her own windpipe.”
Joe put his face in his hands. He could see her in the coffee shop a month ago, could see her as a girl walking up the stairs of police headquarters in her plaid skirt and her little white socks and her saddle shoes, books under her arm. And then the one he only imagined but which was twice as vividâmutilating herself as a bathtub filled with her blood, her mouth open in a permanent scream.
“Was it a bathtub?”
Esteban gave him a curious frown. “Was what a bathtub?”
“Where she killed herself.”
“No.” He shook his head. “She did it in bed. Her father's bed.”
Joe put his hands over his face again and kept them there.
“Please tell me you're not blaming yourself,” Esteban said after a while.
Joe said nothing.
“Joseph, look at me.”
Joe lowered his hands and exhaled a long breath.
“She went west, and like so many girls who do that, she was preyed upon. You didn't prey on her.”
“But men in our profession did.” Joe placed his drink on the corner of the desk and paced the length of the rug and back again, trying to find the words. “Each compartment in this thing we do? Feeds the other compartments. The booze profits pay for the girls and the girls pay for the narcotics needed to hook other girls into fucking strangers for our profit. Those girls try to get off the shit or forget how to be docile? They get beaten, Esteban, you know that. They try to get clean, then they make themselves vulnerable to a smart cop. So someone cuts their throats and throws them in a river. And we've spent the last ten years raining bullets on the competition and on one another. And for what? For fucking money.”
“This is the ugly side of living life outside the law.”
“Aw, shit,” Joe said. “We're not outlaws. We're gangsters.”
Esteban held his gaze for a bit and then said, “There's no talking to you when you're like this.” He flipped the framed photo over on his desk and gazed at it. “We're not our brother's keeper, Joseph. In fact, it's an insult to our brother to presume he can't take care of himself.”
Loretta, Joe thought. Loretta, Loretta. We took and took from you and expected you to somehow soldier on without the parts we stole.
Esteban was pointing at the photograph. “Look at these people. They are dancing and drinking and
living
. Because they could be dead tomorrow. We could be dead tomorrow, you and I. If one of these revelers, say this manâ”
Esteban pointed at a bulldog-faced gent in a white dinner jacket, a group of women arrayed behind him, like they were about to lift the chunky bastard onto their shoulders, the women all aglitter in sequins and lamé.
“âwere to die on his drive home because he was too drunk on Suarez Reserve to see straight, is that our fault?”
Joe looked past the bulldog man to all those lovely women, most of them Cuban with hair and eyes the color of Graciela's.
“Is that our fault?” Esteban said.
Except one woman. A smaller woman, looking away from the camera, at something out of the frame, as if someone had come into the room and called her name as the camera flashed. A woman with hair the color of sand and eyes as pale as winter.
“What?” Joe said.
“Is it our fault?” Esteban said. “If some
mamón
decides toâ”
“When was this taken?” Joe said.
“When?”
“Yes, yes. When?”
“That's the opening night of Zoot.”
“And when did it open?”
“Last month.”
Joe looked across the desk at him. “You're sure?”
Esteban laughed. “It's my restaurant. Of course I'm sure.”
Joe gulped his drink down. “There's no way this photo could have been taken at another time and gotten mixed up with the one taken last month?”
“What? No. What other time?”
“Say six years ago.”
Esteban shook his head, still chuckling, but his eyes darkening with concern. “No, no, no, Joseph. No. This was taken a month ago. Why?”
“Because this woman right here?” Joe put his finger on Emma Gould. “She's been dead since 1927.”
Y
ou're sure it's her?” Dion said the next morning in Joe's office.
From his inside pocket, Joe removed the photograph Esteban had pulled back out of the frame last night. He placed it on the desk in front of Dion. “You tell me.”
Dion's eyes drifted and then locked and finally widened. “Oh, yeah, that's her all right.” He looked sideways at Joe. “You tell Graciela?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You tell your women everything?”
“I don't tell 'em shit, but you're more of a nance than me. And she's carrying your child.”
“That's true.” He looked up at the copper ceiling. “I didn't tell her yet because I don't know how.”
“It's easy,” Dion said. “You just say âHoney, sweetie, dearest, you remember that filly I was sweet on before you? One I told you went tits-up? Well, she's alive and living in your hometown and still quite the dish. Speaking of dishes, what's for dinner?' ”
Sal, standing by the door, looked down to hide a chuckle.
“You enjoying yourself?” Joe asked Dion.
“Time of my life,” Dion said, his girth shaking the chair.
“D,” Joe said, “we're talking about six years of rage here, six years of . . .” Joe threw his hands up at it, unable to put it into words. “I survived Charlestown because of that rage, I hung Maso off a fucking roof because of it, chased Albert White out of Tampa, hell, Iâ”
“Built an empire because of it.”
“Yeah.”
“So when you see her?” Dion said. “Tell her thanks from me.”
Joe's mouth was open, but he couldn't think of anything to say.
“Look,” Dion said, “I never liked the cooze. You know that. But she sure found a way to inspire you, boss. Reason I ask if you told Graciela is because I
do
like her. I like her a lot.”
“I like her a lot too,” Sal said, and they both looked over at him. He held up his right hand, the Thompson in his left. “Sorry.”
“We talk a certain way,” Dion said to him, “because we used to beat each other up when we were kids. To you, he's always the boss.”
“Won't happen again.”
Dion turned back to Joe.
“We didn't beat each other up when we were kids,” Joe said.
“Sure we did.”
“No,” Joe said. “You beat the shit out of me.”
“You hit me with a brick.”
“So you'd stop beating the shit out of me.”
“Oh.” Dion was quiet for a moment. “I had a point.”
“When?”
“When I came through the door. Oh, we gotta talk about Maso's visit. And you hear about Irv Figgis?”
“I heard about Loretta, yeah.”
Dion shook his head. “We all heard about Loretta. But last night? Irv walked into Arturo's place? Apparently that's where Loretta scored her last vial of junk the night before last?”
“Okay . . .”
“Yeah, well, Irv beat Arturo near to death.”
“No.”
Dion nodded. “Kept saying âRepent, repent,' and just driving his fists down like fucking pistons. Arturo could lose an eye.”
“Shit. And Irv?”
Dion whirled his index finger beside his temple. “They got him on a sixty-day observation bit at the bughouse in Temple Terrace.”
“Christ,” Joe said, “what did we do to these people?”
Dion's face darkened to scarlet. He turned and pointed at Sal Urso. “You never fucking saw this, get me?”
Sal said, “Saw what?” and Dion slapped Joe across the face.
Slapped him so hard Joe hit the desk. He bounced off it and came back with his .32 already pointed into the folds under Dion's chin.
Dion said, “I'm not watching you walk into another life-or-death meeting knowing you're half-hoping to die over something you had nothing to do with. You want to shoot me here and now?” He flung his arms wide. “Pull the fucking trigger.”
“Don't think I will?”
“I don't care if you
do,
” Dion said. “Because I'm not going to watch you try to kill yourself a second time. You're my brother. You get me, you stupid fucking mick? You. More than Seppi or Paolo, God rest 'em. You. And I can't lose another fucking brother. Can't do it.”
Dion grabbed Joe's wrist, curled his finger over Joe's trigger finger, and dug the gun even deeper into the folds of his neck. He closed his eyes and tightened his lips against his teeth.
“By the way,” he said, “when you going over there?”
“Where?”
“Cuba.”
“Who said I'm going over there?”
Dion frowned. “You just found out this dead girl you used to be bugs for is alive and breathing about three hundred miles south of here, and you're going to just
sit
with that information?”
Joe removed his gun and placed it back in its holster. He noticed Sal looking white as ash and moist as a hot towel. “I'm going as soon as this meeting with Maso's over. You know how the old man can talk.”
“Which is what I come here to discuss.” Dion opened the moleskin notebook he carried with him everywhere, thumbed the pages. “There's a lot of things I don't like about this.”
“Such as?”
“Him and his guys took over half a train to come down here. That's an awful big entourage.”
“He's oldâhe got the nurse with him everywhere, maybe a doctor, and he keeps four gunners around him at all times.”
Dion nodded. “Well, he's got at least twenty guys with him. That's not twenty nurses. He took over the Romero Hotel on Eighth. The whole hotel. Why?”
“Security.”
“But he always stays at the Tampa Bay Hotel. Just takes over a floor. His security's guaranteed that way. Why commandeer a whole hotel in the middle of Ybor?”
“I think he's getting more paranoid,” Joe said.
He wondered what he'd say to her when he saw her.
Remember me?
Or was that too corny?
“Boss,” Dion said, “listen to me for a second. He didn't take the Seaboard out here direct. He started on the Illinois Central. He stopped in Detroit, KC, Cincinnati, and Chicago.”
“Right. Where all his whiskey partners are.”
“It's also where all the bosses are. All the ones who matter outside of New York and Providence, and guess where he went two weeks ago?”
Joe looked across the desk at his friend. “New York and Providence.”
“Yup.”
“So you think what?”
“I don't know.”
“You think he's barnstorming the country asking permission to take us out?”
“Maybe.”
Joe shook his head. “Makes no sense, D. In five years, we've quadrupled the profits of this organization. This was a fucking cow town when we got here. Last year we nettedâwhat?âeleven million from rum alone?”
“Eleven-five,” Dion said. “And we've more than quadrupled.”
“So why fuck up a good thing? I don't buy Maso's âJoseph, you're like a son to me' bullshit any more than you do. But he respects the numbers. And our numbers are first-rate.”
Dion nodded. “I agree it makes no sense to take us out. But I don't like these signs. I don't like how they make my stomach feel.”
“That's the paella you ate last night.”
Dion gave him a weak smile. “Sure. Maybe that's it.”
Joe stood. He parted the blinds and looked out on the factory floor. Dion was worried, but Dion was paid to worry. So he was doing his job. In the end, Joe knew, everyone in this business did what they did to make the most money they could make. Simple as that. And Joe made money. Bags and bags of it that went up the seaboard with the bottles of rum and filled the safe in Maso's mansion in Nahant. Every year Joe made more than he had the year before. Maso was ruthless and he'd grown a bit less predictable as his health declined. But he was, above all else, greedy. And Joe fed that greed. He kept its stomach warm and full. There was no logical reason Maso would risk going hungry again to replace Joe. And why replace Joe? He'd committed no transgressions. He didn't skim off the top. He posed no threat to Maso's power.
Joe turned from the window. “Do whatever you have to do to guarantee my safety at that meeting.”
“I can't guarantee your safety at the meeting,” Dion said. “That's my problem with it. He's got you walking into a building where he's bought up every room. They're probably sweeping the place right now, so I can't get any soldiers in there, I can't tuck any weapons anywhere, nothing. You're going in blind. And we'll be on the outside just as blind. If they decide you're not walking out of that building?” Dion tapped the desktop with his index finger several times. “Then you are not walking out of that building.”
Joe considered his friend for a long time. “What's gotten into you?”
“A feeling.”
“A feeling ain't a fact,” Joe said. “And the facts are there's no percentage in killing me. It benefits no one.”
“As far as you know.”
T
he Romero Hotel was a ten-story redbrick building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. It catered to commercial travelers who weren't quite important enough for their companies to put them up at the Tampa Hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotelâevery room had a toilet and washbasin, and the sheets were changed every second day; room service was available in the morning and on Friday and Saturday eveningsâbut it wasn't palatial by any means.
Joe, Sal, and Lefty were met at the front door by Adamo and Gino Valocco, brothers from Calabria. Joe had known Gino in Charlestown Pen', and they chatted as they walked through the lobby.
“Where you living now?” Joe said.
“Salem,” Gino said. “It's not so bad.”
“You settled down?”
Gino nodded. “Found a nice Italian girl. Two kids now.”
“Two?” Joe said. “You work fast.”
“I like a big family. You?”
Joe wasn't telling a fucking gun monkey, pleasant as he could be to chat with, about his impending fatherhood. “Still thinking about it.”
“Don't wait too long,” Gino said. “You need the energy for when they're young.”
It was one of the things about the business Joe always found charming and absurd at the same timeâfive men walking to an elevator, four of them carrying machine guns, all of them packing handguns, two of them asking each other about the wife and kids.
At the elevator, Joe kept Gino talking about his kids a bit more as he tried to catch a whiff of ambush odor. Once they climbed in that elevator, any illusions they had of an exit route ended.
But that's all they wereâillusions. The moment they'd walked through the front door, they'd given up their freedom. Given up their lives if Maso, for some demented motive Joe couldn't fathom, wanted to end them. The elevator was just the smaller box within the bigger box. But the fact that they were in a box was impossible to argue.
Maybe Dion was right.
And maybe Dion was wrong.
Only one way to find out.
They left the Valocco brothers and got in the elevator. The operator was Ilario Nobile, permanently gaunt and yellowed by hep', but a magician with a gun. They said he could put a rifle shot through a flea's ass during a solar eclipse and could sign his name on a windowsill with a Thompson and not chip a pane of glass.
As they rode up to the top floor, Joe chatted with Ilario as easily as he had with Gino Valocco. In Ilario's case, the trick was to talk about the man's dogs. He bred beagles out of his home in Revere and was known to produce dogs of gentle temperament and the softest ears.
But as they rose in the car, Joe wondered again if maybe Dion had been onto something. The Valocco brothers and Ilario Nobile were all known gunners. They weren't muscle and they weren't brains. They were killers.
In the tenth-floor hallway, though, the only other person waiting for them was Fausto Scarfone, another artisan with a weapon to be sure, but it was him and only him, which left an even match to wait in the corridorâtwo of Maso's guys, two of Joe's.
Maso himself opened the doors to the Gasparilla Suite, the nicest suite in the hotel. He hugged Joe and took both sides of his face in his hands when he kissed his forehead. He hugged him again and patted him hard on the back.
“How are you, my son?”
“I'm very good, Mr. Pescatore. Thanks for asking.”
“Fausto, see if his men need anything.”
“Take their rods, Mr. Pescatore?”
Maso frowned. “Of course not. You gentlemen make yourselves comfortable. We shouldn't be too long.” Maso pointed at Fausto. “Anyone wants a sandwich or something, you call room service. Anything these boys want.”
He led Joe into the suite and closed the doors behind them. One set of windows looked out on an alley and the yellow brick building next door, a piano manufacturer who'd gone belly-up in '29. All that remained was his name,
HORACE R. PORTER
, fading on the brick, and a bunch of boarded-up windows. The other windows, though, looked out on nothing that would remind guests of the Depression. They overlooked Ybor and the channels that led out to Hillsborough Bay.
In the center of the living area four armchairs were arranged around an oak coffee table. A sterling silver coffeepot and matching creamer and sugar bowl sat in the center. So did a bottle of anisette and three small glasses of it, already poured. Maso's middle son, Santo, sat waiting for them, looking up at Joe as he poured himself a cup of coffee and placed the cup down beside an orange.
Santo Pescatore was thirty-one and everyone called him Digger, though no one could remember why, not even Santo himself.
“You remember Joe, Santo.”
“I dunno. Maybe.” He half rose from his chair and gave Joe a limp, damp handshake. “Call me Digger.”