Magic City (13 page)

Carlos had one shot left, and both of them knew it. Adjusting his aim, he hesitated a second too long. Thorn waded in and crashed the bat against his shoulder, lowered his aim and slammed the man's belly, then his knees, and finally rose up to pound his skull and level a blow across the face.

A bulge of blood erupted from Carlos's lips; teeth shattered and sprayed. The small man crumpled in a pile of softened bones and helpless flesh.

Thorn raised the bat to hack again but checked his swing.

He'd gone too far already. He was not so crazed that he didn't grasp that. To push further was to step across a divide that even in that full flush of frenzy he knew meant losing connection with the world of man.

Thorn spun around and took aim at Snake's last position, swinging a wild roundhouse but hammering only the corner of a shelf.

Snake was halfway down the aisle. Deserting his kid brother. Thorn in pursuit. Carrying the bat of blood. Blood on his hands. Leaving slimy tracks on the floor. Snake at the door, running, sliding into the narrow hallway.

The biker granny at the other end stood in the entranceway to the store. Her tattoos wriggled as if alive; the hallway warped like fun-house magic.

Snake was fast, opening up distance between them.

Thorn halted, took aim. Two-handed, he raised the bat overhead, slung it like a long-handled ax, and end over end, it whirled down the hall and struck Snake in the spine and sent him sprawling headfirst, and the photo fell from his hand.

Snake struggled to his feet, took a glance back at the fallen photograph, saw Thorn sprinting toward him, then turned and slid and stumbled to the doorway, past the biker granny, across the store. Outside.

“Nine-one-one,” Thorn shouted at the old woman. “Do it now!”

“Fuck you, dipswitch.”

Thorn turned, seized the photo, stuffed it under his shirt, and ran back across the bloody trail.

Lawton lay on his back. His chest was still, eyes open, staring up at the fluorescent bulbs, beyond their light. Lips relaxed into a loose smile as though he were engaged in reuniting with the loving wife who'd been his partner for a faithful half century.

Alexandra had dragged herself across the room and snugged against her father's body. Two ragged holes pocked her blouse. Left shoulder, left upper arm. Pale and shaky. Her eyes wet. A shiver in her jaw.

“Is he gone?” Thorn said.

She managed the barest nod.

“And you?”

“I'll live.” Though her voice was frail, sleepy.

“God, Alex. I'm so sorry. Jesus, I'm sorry.”

She tipped her head up slowly. Her lips were quivering, eyes hollowed.

There was the dry ache of helpless despair in her voice.

“What have you done, Thorn? What the hell have you done?”

“I tried to keep him safe. I did the best I could.”

Her lips puckered and she blew out a puff of wind as though she were lifting an intolerable weight. As her arms tightened around her father, it seemed that against all natural laws, she was determined to keep his body warm.

The gray bleakness in her eyes was beyond measure. She held his gaze for several moments, then her head sagged and she looked down at the frail figure in her arms.

“A photograph, Thorn? Some goddamn meaningless photograph?”

She huddled her body around her father's, her long black hair falling across his face, hugging him tight against her.

Thorn dug out the cell phone, dialed 911, gave the address. He turned his eyes away from Alex and her fallen father. A sight he could no longer bear.

“Officer down,” he said to the dispatcher. “Officer down.”

Pauline Caufield's secretary said five o'clock on the button, but it was five-thirty already and Pauline was nowhere to be seen. Measuring each breath, Stanton King sat quietly in the Zen garden and watched the Japanese caretaker pad serenely across the walkway till he was standing only a foot away.

“Mr. King, what happen to you?”

Yumi was holding the Zen rake. Just finished freshening the western corner, combing the sand back into perfect parallel lines.

“You mean my haircut?”

Yumi drew closer to Stanton King's bench. An hour earlier Stanton had visited a barber for the first time in years. He'd guided the hapless young lady through the process of buzzing away the unruly mass into a boxy military cut. The gray bristling look of an ex-Marine. Gearing up for what he suspected would be the final phase of his visit on earth.

“Haircut okay, but your face. Oh, sir, you have bad fall?”

“A fall from grace, I'm afraid,” Stanton said.

His left eye was black and swollen from the morning's encounter with Edward Runyon and the windowpane. His forehead was a bruised lump.

Yumi of the flawless skin and unreadable features, bowed in acceptance of the mystery of Stanton King's transformation. He went back to his sand, resumed his task, raking with feathery precision, making subtle corrections in the furrows. His perpetual duty and the ultimate test of his wisdom. Yumi kept the Japanese gardens in perfect harmonic accord with the natural scheme beyond the walls. A skill so rare that when Yumi passed on, no doubt the garden would, too. The modern world simply wasn't replacing men like Yumi.

Four decades earlier the dashing mayor of Miami, Stanton King, was instrumental in arranging the financial covenant between Mr. Shohei Ichimura, a wealthy businessman, and the city government. It was Ichimura's dream to bring to the city he had grown to love an art that expressed the essence of his native culture. The creation of the Japanese Gardens was indeed one of the few lasting contributions for which Stanton could take some credit.

Since he had dropped out of public life, nearly all of Stanton King's afternoons were spent in the Ichimura Miami-Japan Gardens. On a single acre snugged in beside the Parrot Jungle amusement park and bordered to the east by a finger of Biscayne Bay and to the north by MacArthur Causeway.

Just beyond that bustling freeway was Government Cut, the main channel out to the ocean, and sprawling on its shoreline was the port of Miami, with colossal cruise ships coming and going. Overhead a steady flow of single-engine planes towed advertising banners for Happy Hour Tequila parties and Coppertone lotion, on their way to parade up and down the coastline.

Yet somehow, even with the cars so close, the hurtling trucks, the motorcycles, boats in the bay, sky droning with planes, all that modern bustle dissolved to an exquisite silence within the high stone walls. Inside the garden a cone of peace prevailed. A pink orchid tree, coral walls, rock garden, pond, a three-hundred-year-old stone pagoda. His own refuge in the center of a city that had once been his domain. A place apart. A location as pure and empty as the heart of a guiltless man.

It was almost six o'clock, the late-afternoon sun dwindling into the distant Everglades, a rosy light saturating the sky, and still no Pauline.

Stanton had weighed the pros and cons of using the Japanese gardens as the rendezvous site. His major concern was karmic tainting. That Pauline Caufield with her manic vibrations, the stench of supremacy, would befoul Stanton's one pristine space. But he decided that the power of the garden to cleanse itself was greater than the contamination she could wreak. Above all else, if he had to die, this was exactly the place he would choose.

Before he heard her approach, she was beside him. Her faint perfume, something musky with a sunny tang of orange, filtered through the breeze.

“Is that who you're worshipping now, Stanton? The god of overindulgence?”

She took a seat on the bench.

“Hotei is the deity of contentment and happiness.” Stanton did not look her way but kept his gaze fixed on the laughing Buddha. “That cloth bag he carries is filled with food and coins to feed the hungry and save the needy.”

“A liberal,” she said. “A fat, happy liberal.”

“This garden,” said Stanton. “Its original name was San-Ai-An. The abode of three loves. Love of country. Love of fellow man. Love of work. An ethic that you and I once shared, I believe.”

“I didn't come for a lesson in Jap culture.”

He turned then and looked at her. In the unsparing Miami sun, her skin had a faultless glow and she still possessed a boyishly trim body, no breasts or hips to speak of, but there was that same iron vigor in her posture, her brown eyes brimming with power and certainty. She wore her blond hair in a simple cut that teased her shoulders. Ragged bangs, and those same heavy masculine eyebrows and cheekbones that could slice a strand of barbed wire.

Stanton had gotten to know her in those weeks in '64 when events in Miami had her full attention. Even in her mid-twenties she had the air of command. Like Stanton, she was on the fast track to the highest rungs of her profession. Firm and precise, she could stare into the eyes of any man and back him down if it suited her. She answered to powers back in Washington, men whose names and rank gave Stanton chills. To the last man, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had signed off on their mission, and Pauline Caufield was made field commander.

Over the years he had looked her up in his Internet ramblings and tracked her movements in and out of a series of shadowy international corporations. She did business with a set of men and women who for decades circulated through different administrations and think tanks and political foundations. Power brokers who when they were not feeding at the public trough were sitting on the boards of the world's most prestigious corporations. Nuclear power, oil, aerospace, armaments.

It would have been easy to mistake Pauline Caufield for a second-tier functionary. An appendage to far more powerful and devious men. But Stanton would never make that error. He'd witnessed firsthand the extremes she was capable of. What risks she was willing to take with her own life and the lives of others in the interests of advancing her agenda and her career. She was not a woman to settle for anything less than full authority.

In the past few years during her latest tenure in Miami, their paths had crossed half a dozen times. He'd spotted her at social events and fund-raisers. And though they had only nodded at each other and moved on without a word, Stanton always felt a tremor in his blood when he caught sight of the woman.

She was staring at him now with that same unblinking gaze he remembered from long ago. He smiled, but she didn't return it. Try as he might, he couldn't sustain his own.

“Get to it, Stanton.”

“You know, Caufield, you're disrupting the hell out of the feng shui.”

“This photograph,” she said. “Tell me about it.”

“Always to the point.”

“I'm not swimming in the rivers eternal,” she said. “Like you, Stanton.”

“Cassius Marcellus Clay versus Sonny Liston.”

“I remember it well.”

“And the rest of that night? Is it still fresh?”

She stretched her legs, heels digging into the pea rock. She set her leather purse on the bench between them, drew her skirt up a few inches as if to catch some of the fading Miami sun.

“We could sit out here all evening and do tit for tat, or you could simply tell me what the issue is.”

“I have the complete file on Southwoods. I wasn't lying to Runyon. Names, dates, everything.”

Her lips went flat and her cheeks hardened as if she were holding back the vilest threat she knew.

“I was young,” he said. “Naive. I had absolute faith in my country. But even then I knew the risk I was taking. So I snagged those papers for leverage. Just in case.”

“And this is the case.”

“I sold my soul to you people. I risked everything.”

“Speak, Stanton.” She rose and her eyes flicked across the sculptures, the waterfall, the palms, the manicured sand, and he could see how shabby, how provincial, this holy place must seem to her. This woman who had visited the world's great shrines and taken their measure in the glow of kings and tyrants.

“It's a simple black-and-white snapshot,” he said. “The photographer is well known locally, and his show was going on tour after a month here in Miami. Chicago, Atlanta, D.C., Manhattan. You and I sitting in the third row.”

“That's all?”

“Someone would've noticed. Someone was bound to.”

“I'm a boxing fan. No crime in that.”

“Reporters looking for a story. Someone would've noticed, gotten out their magnifying glass, tugged on that thread till the unraveling started.”

“Who else is in the photo, Stanton?”

“You were to my right, Meyer Lansky was two down on the left.”

She looked at him. A flash in her eyes as she ran the possibilities.

“Miami was full of mobsters. Still is. Means nothing. Coincidence.”

“Between Lansky and me there was a square-jawed gentleman in a military haircut. Cheering, waving his hand. Big pinkie ring.”

She held her tongue. Looking at him, waiting.

“While Runyon cheered, he was leaning over, whispering something in Lansky's ear, very chummy, just as the flashbulb popped. And remember, Lansky wasn't just a run-of-the-mill mobster. He was, at that moment, one of the lords of the underworld. Murder Inc.”

“And that's it?”

“Not quite,” Stanton said. “There were others in our party that night. Don't you remember?”

Pauline Caufield stiffened, drew a breath. She looked out at Hotei, always laughing, always merry and bright. Belly full, arms uplifted.

“When Cassius was twelve,” Stanton said, “a normal kid, no ambition to be a fighter, he left his sixty-dollar bike outside the Columbia Auditorium in Louisville to visit some bazaar. When he came out, his Schwinn was gone.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Clay was in a rage. He found a cop in the basement of a gym nearby and demanded this officer start a statewide search for his bike. He said he was going to beat the hell out of the thief when he found him. The cop, I forget his name, he asked Cassius if he even knew how to fight and Clay said no. That's how it started. Cop took him under his wing. Taught him some moves. Saw how quick he was, what a natural. All because his bike was stolen.”

Caufield was eyeing him carefully now. In the presence of a madman.

“The moral,” he said. “You never know what minor event will unleash the furies.”

“Who else is in this photo, Stanton? Stop wasting my time.”

“Do you recall a certain Cuban gentleman from Miami, a fellow with a pencil mustache? What
was
his name? I remember he was a plumber.”

Caufield's lips parted with a soft snap.

“He was sitting beside you, Pauline, as though you were joined at the hip. His picture was in all the papers the next day. He made quite a stir.”

“I forgot he was there,” she said to herself. “The guy was a nobody.”

Stanton looked back at Hotei.

“Perhaps he was a nobody when the picture was taken. But he was quite a celebrity twenty-four hours later.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“So you see. That's a stunning group. Lansky, you, me, Runyon, this other gentleman. Some sharp-eyed reporter digging around, who knows what else they'd find? Because don't forget we weren't the only ones in the third row that night. I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.”

“All right. All right.”

“I saw it hanging on the gallery wall and my heart flew out of my shirt.”

“Where is this photo now?”

“Long story,” Stanton said. “There's only one copy left, so far as I can gather. It's fallen into someone's hands. They don't know what they've got, I'm certain of that.”

“Oh, this is beautiful.”

“The sins of our fathers.”

Hotei beamed. Stretching his arms up toward the Miami sky.

Pauline sat down again on the bench beside him. She was silent, eyes making calculations, a slow firming of her jaw. A woman hardened by trials and burdens he had no reckoning of. Not the Pauline he had once known.

“You and Runyon,” she said. “You'll be the point men.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I'm serious. You and Runyon.”

“With your resources, you'd rely on two old men?”

“Here's how it's going to work, Stanton. You know this town. You still have contacts. So I feel comfortable entrusting you with the role of facilitator. Runyon will handle the heavy lifting. You two find the photo, destroy it. I'll provide what cover I can. I have good relations with the FBI's Miami field office. They're not turf-conscious assholes looking for a fight. But any help I provide will still be limited. I'm sure you understand.”

“Runyon and me. What can we do?”

“I have great confidence in you, Stanton. And Runyon may be long in the tooth, but even if I tried, I couldn't find anyone tougher.”

Pauline resettled her purse on her lap and looked up at a fleet of white gulls navigating the invisible sea above.

“Forget it,” Stanton said. “I won't do it.”

Pauline swept a stray strand of blond hair off her cheek.

“Everyone has their secrets,” she said. “But as I seem to recall, you and Lola have more than your share. Given Lola's high profile in the community, I'm sure public exposure of certain details of her past and your own would be the last thing either of you would want.”

Stanton felt some part of his viscera shift downward.

“So it's blackmail. I do your bidding, or you out my wife.”

“Characterize it as you will, Stanton. But Director Waters has charged me with making this situation go away quickly and completely. We'll provide backup assistance to the degree we can. Runyon knows the protocol. I'll give you both my private line, you can reach me in an instant.”