Live by Night

CHAPTER ELEVEN Best in the City

When Maso had first proposed that Joe take over his West Florida operations, he’d warned him about the heat. But Joe still wasn’t prepared for the wall of it that met him when he stepped onto the platform at Tampa Union Station on an August morning in 1929. He wore a summer-weight glen plaid suit. He’d left the vest behind in his suitcase, but standing on the platform, waiting for the porter to bring his bags, jacket over his arm and tie loosened, he was soaked by the time he finished smoking a cigarette. He’d removed his Wilton when he stepped off the train, worried that the heat would leach the pomade from his hair and suck it into the silk lining, but he put it back on to protect his skull from the sun needles as more pores in his chest and arms sprang leaks.

It wasn’t just the sun, which hung high and white in a sky swept so clear of clouds it was as if clouds had never existed (and maybe they didn’t down here; Joe had no idea), it was the jungle humidity, like he was wrapped inside a ball of steel wool someone had dropped into a pot of oil. And every minute or so, the burner got turned up another notch.

The other men who’d exited the train had, like Joe, removed their suit jackets; some had removed their vests and ties and rolled up their sleeves. Some had donned their hats; others had removed them and waved them in front of their faces. The women travelers wore wide-brimmed velvet hats, felt cloches, or poke bonnets. Some poor souls had elected for even heavier material and ear treatments. They wore crepe dresses and silk scarves, but they didn’t look very happy about it, their faces red, their carefully tended hair sprouting splits and curls, the chignons unraveling at the napes of a few necks.

You could tell the locals easily—the men wore skimmers, short-sleeved shirts, and gabardine trousers. Their shoes were two-toned like most men’s these days but more brightly colored than those of the train passengers. If the women wore headgear, they wore straw gigolo hats. They wore very simple dresses, lots of white, like the one on the gal passing him now, absolutely nothing special about her white skirt and matching blouse and both a little threadbare. But, Jesus, Joe thought, the body under it—moving under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water.

The heat must have made him slower than usual because the woman caught him looking, something he’d never been nabbed for back home. But the woman—a mulatto or maybe even a Negress of some kind, he couldn’t tell, but definitely dark, copper dark—gave him a damning flick of her eyes and kept walking. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the two years in prison, but Joe couldn’t stop watching her move beneath the thin dress. Her hips rose and fell in the same languid motion as her ass, a music to it all as the bones and muscles in her back rose and fell in a concert of the body. Jesus, he thought, I have been in prison too long. Her dark wiry hair was tied into a chignon at the back of her head, but a single strand fell down her neck. She turned back to shoot him a glare. He looked down before it reached him, feeling like a nine-year-old who’d been caught pulling a girl’s pigtails in the schoolyard. And then he wondered what he had to be ashamed of. She’d looked back, hadn’t she?

When he looked up again, she was lost to the crowd down the other end of the platform. You have nothing to fear from me, he wanted to tell her. You’ll never break my heart and I’ll never break yours. I’m out of the heartbreak business.

Joe had spent the last two years accepting not only that Emma was dead but that, for him, there’d never be another love. Someday, he might marry, but it would be a sensible arrangement, certain to raise him up in his profession and give him heirs. He loved the idea of that word—heirs. (Working-class men had sons. Successful men had heirs.) In the meantime, he’d go to whores. Maybe the woman who’d shot him the dirty look was a whore playing the “chaste” tip. If she was, he’d definitely try her out—a beautiful mulatto whore fit for a criminal prince.

When the porter deposited Joe’s bags in front of him, Joe tipped him with bills grown as damp as everything else. He’d been told someone would meet his train, but he’d never thought to ask how they’d pick him out of the crowd. He turned in a slow pivot, looking for a man who appeared sufficiently disreputable, but instead he saw the mulatto woman walking back down the platform toward him. Another strand of hair fell from along her temple and she brushed it back off her cheekbone with her free hand. Her other arm was wrapped in the arm of a Latin guy in a straw skimmer and tan silk trousers with long, sharp pleats and a white collarless shirt buttoned to the top. In this heat, the man’s face was dry, as was his shirt, even at the top, where the button was cinched tight below his Adam’s apple. He moved with the same gentle sway as the woman; it was in his calves and his ankles, even as the steps themselves were so sharp his feet snapped off the platform.

They passed Joe speaking Spanish, the words coming fast and light, and the woman gave Joe the quickest of glances, so quick he might have imagined it, though he doubted it. The man pointed at something down the platform and said something in his rapid Spanish, and they both chuckled, and then they were past him.

He was turning to take another look for whoever was picking him up, when someone did just that—lifted him off the hot platform like he weighed no more than a sack of laundry. He looked down at the two beefy arms wrapped around his midsection and smelled a familiar reek of raw onions and Arabian Sheik cologne.

He was dropped back onto the platform and spun around and he faced his old friend for the first time since that awful day in Pittsfield.

“Dion,” he said.

Dion had traded chubbiness for corpulence. He wore a champagne-colored four-button suit, chalk-striped. His lavender shirt had a high white contrasting collar over a bloodred tie with black stripes. His black and white speculator shoes were laced up above the ankles. If you asked an old man gone poor of sight to identify the gangster on the platform from a hundred yards away, he’d point his shaking finger at Dion.

“Joseph,” he said with a starchy formality. Then his round face collapsed around a wide smile and he lifted Joe off the ground again, this time from the front and hugged him so tight Joe feared for his spine.

“Sorry about your father,” he whispered.

“Sorry about your brother.”

“Thank you,” Dion said with a strange brightness. “All for canned ham.” He let Joe down and smiled. “I would have bought him his own pigs.”

They walked down the platform in the heat.

Dion took one of Joe’s suitcases from him. “When Lefty Downer found me in Montreal and told me the Pescatores wanted me to come work for them, I thought it was a right bamboozle, I don’t mind telling you. But then they said you were jailing with the old man and I thought, ‘If anyone could charm the devil himself, it’s my old partner.’ ” He slapped a thick arm against Joe’s shoulders. “It’s just swell to have you back.”

Joe said, “Good to be out in free air.”

“Was Charlestown…?”

Joe nodded. “Maybe worse than they say. But I figured out a way to make it livable.”

“Bet you did.”

The heat was even whiter in the parking lot. It bounced up off the crushed shell lot and off the cars, and Joe placed a hand above his eyebrows but it didn’t help much.

“Christ,” he said to Dion, “and you’re wearing a three-piece.”

“Here’s the secret,” Dion said as they reached a Marmon 34 and he dropped Joe’s suitcase to the crushed shell pavement. “Next time you’re in a department store, clip every shirt in your size. I wear four in a day.”

Joe looked at his lavender shirt. “You found four in that color?”

“Found eight.” He opened the back door of the car and put Joe’s luggage inside. “We’re only going a few blocks, but in this heat…”

Joe reached for the passenger door but Dion beat him to it. Joe looked at him. “You’re having me on.”

“I work for you now,” Dion said. “Boss Joe Coughlin.”

“Quit it.” Joe shook his head at the absurdity of it and climbed inside.

As they pulled out of the station lot, Dion said, “Reach under your seat. You’ll find a friend.”

Joe did and came back with a Savage .32 automatic. Indian Head grips and a three-and-a-half-inch barrel. Joe slid it into the right pocket of his trousers and told Dion he’d need a holster for it, feeling a mild irritation that Dion hadn’t thought to bring one with him.

“You want mine?” Dion said.

“No,” Joe said. “I’m fine.”

“Because I can give you mine.”

“No,” Joe said, thinking that being the boss was going to take some getting used to. “I’ll just need one soon.”

“End of the day,” Dion said. “No later, I promise.”

Traffic moved as slow as everything else down here. Dion drove them into Ybor City. Here the sky lost its hard white and picked up a bronze smear from the factory smoke. Cigars, Dion explained, had built this neighborhood. He pointed at brick buildings and their tall smokestacks and the smaller buildings—some just shotgun shacks with front and back doors open—where workers sat hunched over tables rolling cigars.

He rattled off the names—El Reloj and Cuesta-Rey, Bustillo, Celestino Vega, El Paraiso, La Pila, La Trocha, El Naranjal, Perfecto Garcia. He told Joe the most esteemed position in any factory was that of the reader, a man who sat in a chair in the center of the work floor and read aloud from great novels as the workers toiled. He explained that a cigar maker was called a tabaquero, the small factories were chinchals or buckeyes, and the food he might be smelling through the smoke stench was probably bolos or empanadas.

“Listen to you.” Joe whistled. “Speaking the language like the king of Spain.”

“You have to around here,” Dion said. “Italian too. You better brush up.”

“You speak Italian, my brother did, but I never picked it up.”

“Well, I hope you’re still as quick a learner as you used to be. Reason we get to do our business here in Ybor is because the rest of the city just leaves us alone. Far as they’re concerned, we’re just dirty spics and dirty wops and as long as we don’t make too much noise or the cigar workers don’t go on strike again, make the owners call in the cops and the head breakers, then we’re left to do what we do.” He turned onto Seventh Avenue, apparently a main drag, people bustling along the clapboard sidewalks under two-story buildings with wide balconies and wrought iron trellises and brick or stucco facades that reminded Joe of the lost weekend he’d had in New Orleans a couple years ago. Tracks ran down the center of the avenue and Joe saw a trolley coming their way from several blocks off, its nose disappearing, then reappearing behind waves of heat.

“You’d think we’d all get along,” Dion said, “but it doesn’t always work out that way. The Italians and the Cubans keep to themselves. But the black Cubans hate the white Cubans, and the white Cubans look at the nigger Cubans like they’re niggers, and they both high-hat everyone else. All Cubans hate the Spaniards. Spaniards think the Cubans are uppity coons who forgot their place since the US of A freed them back in ’98. Then the Cubans and the Spanish look down on the Puerto Ricans, and everyone shits on the Dominicans. The Italians only respect you if you came off the boat from the Boot, and the Americanos actually think someone gives a shit what they think sometimes.”

“Did you actually call us Americanos?”

“I’m Italian,” Dion said, turning left and running them down another wide avenue, although this one wasn’t paved. “And around here? Proud of it.”

Joe saw the blue of the Gulf and the ships in port and the high cranes. He could smell salt, oil slicks, low tide.

“Port of Tampa,” Dion said with a flourish of his hand as he drove them along redbrick streets where men crossed their path in forklifts that burped diesel smoke and the cranes swung two-ton pallets high over their heads, the shadows of the netting crisscrossing the windshield. A steam whistle blew.

Dion pulled over by a cargo pit and they got out, watched the men below take apart a bale of burlap sacks stamped ESCUINTIA, GUATEMALA. From the smell, Joe could tell some of the sacks held coffee and others chocolate. The half-dozen men off-loaded them in no time, and the crane swung the netting and the empty pallet back up, and the men in the hold disappeared through a doorway down there.

Dion led Joe to the ladder and descended.

“Where we going?”

“You’ll see.”

At the bottom of the hold, the men had closed the door behind them. He and Dion stood on a dirt floor that smelled of everything ever off-loaded in the Tampa sun—bananas and pineapple and grain. Oil and potatoes and gas and vinegar. Gunpowder. Spoiled fruit and fresh coffee, the grounds crunching underfoot. Dion placed the flat of his hand to the cement wall opposite the ladder and moved his hand to the right and the wall went with it—just popped up and out of a seam Joe couldn’t see from two feet away. Dion revealed a door and rapped on it twice, then waited, his lips moving as he counted. Then he rapped it another four times and a voice on the other side said, “Who’s it?”

“Fireplace,” Dion said, and the door opened.

A corridor faced them, as thin as the man on the other side of the door, who was dressed in a shirt that might have been white before the sweat tanned it for the ages. His trousers were a brown denim, and he wore a kerchief around his neck and a cowboy hat. A six-gun stuck out of the waistband of his denim trousers. The cowboy nodded at Dion and allowed them to pass before he pushed the wall back into place.

The corridor was so narrow Dion’s shoulders brushed along the walls as he walked ahead of Joe. Dim lights hung from a pipe above them, one bare bulb for every twenty feet or so, half of them out. Joe was pretty sure he could make out a door down the far end of the corridor. He guessed it was about five hundred yards away, which meant he could easily be imagining it. They slogged through mud, water dripping from the ceiling and puddling the floor, and Dion explained that the tunnels commonly flooded; every now and then they’d find a dead drunk in the morning, the last of the stragglers from the night before who’d decided to take an ill-advised nap.

“Seriously?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. Know what makes it worse? Sometimes the rats get to them.”

Joe looked all around himself. “That’s just about the nastiest fucking thing I’ve heard all month.”

Dion shrugged and kept walking and Joe looked up and down the walls and then at the pathway ahead. No rats. Yet.

“The money from the Pittsfield bank,” Dion said as they walked.

Joe said, “It’s safe.” Above him, he could hear the clack of trolley wheels followed by the slow heavy clop of what he assumed was a horse.

“Safe where?” Dion looked back over his shoulder at him.

Joe said, “How’d they know?”

Above them several horns beeped and an engine revved.

“Know what?” Dion said, and Joe noticed he’d grown closer to bald, his dark hair still thick and oily on the sides but ropey and hesitant up top.

“Where to ambush us.”

Dion looked back at him again. “They just did.”

“There’s no way they ‘just did.’ We scouted that location for weeks. The cops never came out that way because they had no reason to—nothing to protect and no one to serve.”

Dion nodded his big head. “Well, they didn’t hear anything from me.”

“Me, either,” Joe said.

Near the end of the tunnel now, the door revealed itself to be brushed steel with an iron dead bolt. The street sounds had given way to the distant clank of silverware and plates being stacked and waiters’ footsteps rushing back and forth. Joe pulled his father’s watch from his pocket and clicked it open: noon.

Dion produced a sizable key ring from somewhere in his wide trousers. He opened the locks on the door, threw back the bars, and unlocked the bolt. He removed the key from the ring and handed it to Joe. “Take it. You’ll use it, believe me.”

Joe pocketed the key.

“Who owns this place?”

“Ormino did.”

“Did?”

“Oh, you didn’t read today’s papers?”

Joe shook his head.

“Ormino sprung a few leaks last night.”

Dion opened the door, and they climbed a ladder to another door that was unlocked. They opened it and entered a vast, dank room with a cement floor and cement walls. Tables ran along the walls, and on top of the tables were what Joe would have expected to see—fermentors and extractors, retorts and Bunsen burners, beakers and vats and skimming utensils.

“Best money can buy,” Dion said, pointing out thermometers fixed to the walls and connected to the stills by rubber tubing. “You want light rum, you got to remove the fraction at between one sixty-eight and one eighty-six Fahrenheit. That’s really important to keep people from, you know, dying when they drink your hooch. These babies don’t make a mistake, they—”

“I know how to make rum,” Joe said. “In fact, you name the substance, D, after two years in prison, I know how to recondense it. I could probably distill your fucking shoes. What I don’t see here, though, are two things that are pretty essential to making rum.”

“Oh?” Dion said. “What’s that?”

“Molasses and workers.”

“Shoulda mentioned,” Dion said, “we got a problem there.”

They passed through an empty speakeasy and said “Fireplace” through another closed door and entered the kitchen of an Italian restaurant on East Palm Avenue. They passed through the kitchen and into the dining room, where they found a table near the street and close to a tall black fan so heavy it looked like it would take three men and an ox to move it.

“Our distributor is coming up empty.” Dion unfolded his napkin and tucked it into his collar, smoothed it over his tie.

“I can see that,” Joe said. “Why?”

“Boats have been sinking is what I hear.”

“Who’s the distributor again?”

“Guy named Gary L. Smith.”

“Ellsmith?”

“No,” Dion said. “L. The middle initial. He insists you use it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a Southern thing.”

“Not just an asshole thing?”

“Could be that too.”

The waiter brought their menus and Dion ordered them two lemonades, assuring Joe it would be the best he ever tasted.

“Why do we need a distributor?” Joe asked. “Why aren’t we dealing directly with the supplier?”

“Well, there’s a lot of them. And they’re all Cuban. Smith deals with Cubans so we don’t have to. He also deals with the Dixies.”

“The runners.”

Dion nodded as the waiter brought their lemonades. “Yeah, the local guns from here to Virginia. They run it across Florida and up the seaboard.”

“But you’ve been losing a lot of those loads too.”

“Yeah.”

“So how many boats can sink and how many trucks can get hit before it’s more than bad luck?”

“Yeah,” Dion said again because apparently he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Joe sipped his lemonade. He wasn’t sure it was the best he’d ever tasted, and even if it were, it was lemonade. Hard to get fucking excited about lemonade.

“You do what I suggested in my letter?”

Dion nodded. “To a T.”

“How many ended up where I figured?”

“A high percentage.”

Joe scanned the menu for something he recognized.

“Try the osso buco,” Dion said. “Best in the city.”

“Everything’s the ‘best in the city’ with you,” Joe said. “The lemonade, the thermometers.”

Dion shrugged and opened his own menu. “I have refined tastes.”

“That’s it,” Joe said. He closed his menu and caught the waiter’s eye. “Let’s eat and then drop in on Gary L. Smith.”

Dion studied his menu. “A pleasure.”

The morning edition of the Tampa Tribune lay on a table in the waiting room of Gary L. Smith’s office. Lou Ormino’s corpse sat in a car with shattered windows and blood on the seats. In black-and-white, the death photo looked like they all did—undignified. The headline read:

“Did you know him well?”

Dion nodded. “Yeah.”

“You like him?”

Dion shrugged. “He wasn’t a bad sort. Clipped his toenails in a couple meetings, but he gave me a goose last Christmas.”

“Live?”

Dion nodded. “Till I got it home, yeah.”

“Why’d Maso want him out?”

“He never told you?”

Joe shook his head.

Dion shrugged. “Never told me, either.”

For a minute Joe did nothing but listen to a clock tick and Gary L. Smith’s secretary turning the stiff pages of an issue of Photoplay. The secretary’s name was Miss Roe, and her dark hair was cut Eton-crop style into a finger-wave bob. She wore a silver short-sleeved vest blouse with a black silk necktie that fell over her breasts like an answered prayer. She had a way of barely moving in her chair—a kind of quarter-squirm—that had Joe folding up the paper and waving it in his face.

Good Lord, he thought, do I need to get laid.

He leaned forward again. “He have family?”

“Who?”

“Who.”

“Lou? Yeah, he did.” Dion scowled. “Why you got to ask that?”

“I’m just wondering.”

“He probably clipped his toenails in front of them too. They’ll be glad not to have to sweep them into the dustpan anymore.”

The intercom buzzed on the secretary’s desk and a thin voice said, “Miss Roe, send the boys in.”

Joe and Dion stood.

“Boys,” Dion said.

“Boys,” Joe said and shot his cuffs and smoothed his hair.

Gary L. Smith had tiny teeth, like kernels of corn and almost as yellow. He smiled as they entered his office and Miss Roe closed the door behind them, but he didn’t get up, and he didn’t put too much into the smile, either. Behind his desk, plantation shutters blocked most of the West Tampa day, but enough creeped in to give the room a bourbon glow. Smith dressed the part of the Southern gentleman—white suit over white shirt and thin black tie. He watched them take their seats with an air of bemusement, which Joe read as fear.

“So you’re Maso’s new find.” Smith pushed a humidor across the desk at them. “Help yourselves. Best cigars in the city.”

Dion grunted.

Joe waved off the humidor, but Dion helped himself to four cigars, placing three in his pocket and biting off the end of the fourth. He spit it into his hand and laid it on the edge of the desk.

“So what brings you by?”

“I’ve been asked to look over Lou Ormino’s affairs for a little bit.”

“But it’s not permanent,” Smith said, firing up his own cigar.

“What’s not?”

“You as Lou’s replacement. I just mention it because the people ’round here like dealing with who they know, and no one knows you. No offense meant.”

“So who in the organization would you suggest?”

Smith gave it some thought. “Rickie Pozzetta.”

Dion cocked his head at that. “Pozzetta couldn’t lead a dog to a hydrant.”

“Then Delmore Sears.”

“Another idiot.”

“Well, then, fine, I could do it.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Joe said.

Gary L. Smith spread his hands. “Only if you think I could be right for the job.”

“It’s possible, but we need to know why the last three supply runs have been hit.”

“You mean the ones heading north?”

Joe nodded.

“Bad luck,” he said. “Best I can figure. It does happen.”

“Why don’t you change the routes then?”

Smith produced a pen and scribbled on a piece of paper. “That’s a good idea, Mr. Coughlin, is it?”

Joe nodded.

“A great idea. I’ll definitely consider it.”

Joe watched the man for a bit, watched him smoke with the diffused light coming through the blinds and spreading over the top of his head, watched him until Smith started looking a little confused.

“Why have the boat runs been so erratic?”

“Oh,” Smith said easily, “that’s the Cubans. We don’t have any control over that.”

“Two months ago,” Dion said, “you got fourteen shipments in one week, three weeks later it was five, last week it was none.”

“It’s not cement mixing,” Gary L. Smith said. “You don’t add one-third water, get the same consistency every time. You’ve got various suppliers with various schedules, and they might be dealing with a sugar supplier over there had himself a strike? Or the guy who drives the boat gets sick.”

“Then you go to another supplier,” Joe said.

“Not that simple.”

“Why not?”

Smith sounded weary, as if he were being asked to explain airplane mechanics to a cat. “Because they’re all paying tribute to the same group.”

Joe removed a small notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “This would be the Suarez family we’re talking about?”

Smith eyed the notebook. “Yeah. Own the Tropicale up on Seventh.”

“So they’re the only suppliers.”

“No, I just said.”

“Said what?” Joe narrowed his eyes at the man.

“I mean, they do supply some of what we sell but there are all these others too. This one guy I deal with, Ernesto? Old boy has a wooden hand. You believe it? He—”

“If all the other suppliers answer to one supplier, then that supplier is the only supplier. They set the prices and everyone else falls in line, I assume?”

Smith gave it all a sigh of exasperation. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It’s just not that simple.”

“Why isn’t it?”

Joe waited. Dion waited. Smith relit his cigar. “There are other suppliers. They have boats, they have—”

“They’re subcontractors,” Joe said. “That’s all. I want to deal with the contractor. We’ll need a meet with the Suarezes as soon as possible.”

Smith said, “No.”

“No?”

“Mr. Coughlin, you just don’t understand how things are done in Ybor. I deal with Esteban Suarez and his sister. I deal with all the middlemen.”

Joe pushed the telephone across the desk to Smith’s elbow. “Call them.”

“You’re not hearing me, Mr. Coughlin.”

“No, I am,” Joe said softly. “Pick up that phone and call the Suarezes and tell them my associate and I will have dinner tonight at the Tropicale, and we’d really appreciate the best table they have as well as a few minutes of their time once we’ve finished.”

Smith said, “Why don’t you take a couple of days to get to know the customs down here? Then, trust me, you’ll come back and thank me for not calling. And we’ll go meet them together. I promise.”

Joe reached into his pocket. He pulled out some change and placed it on the desk. Then his cigarettes, his father’s watch, followed by his .32, which he left in front of the blotter pointed at Smith. He shook a cigarette from the pack, his eyes on Smith as Smith lifted the phone off the cradle and asked for an outside line.

Joe smoked while Smith spoke Spanish into the phone and Dion translated a bit of it, and then Smith hung up.

“He got us a table for nine o’clock,” Dion said.

“I got you a table for nine o’clock,” Smith said.

“Thank you.” Joe crossed his ankle over his knee. “It’s a brother and sister team, the Suarezes, right?”

Smith nodded. “Esteban and Ivelia Suarez, yes.”

“Now, Gary,” Joe said and pulled a piece of string off his sock by the anklebone, “are you working directly for Albert White?” He dangled the string, then let it drop to Gary L. Smith’s rug. “Or is there an intermediary we should know about?”

“What?”

“We marked your bottles, Smith.”

“You what?”

“If you distilled it, we marked it,” Dion said. “A couple months back. Little dots on the upper-right corner.”

Gary smiled at Joe like he’d never heard such a thing.

“All those supply runs that didn’t make it?” Joe said. “Just about every bottle ended up in one of Albert White’s speaks.” He flicked his ash on the desk. “You explain that?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t…?” Joe put both feet back on the floor.

“No, I mean, I don’t… What?”

Joe reached for his gun. “Sure you do.”

Gary smiled. He stopped smiling. He smiled again. “No, I don’t. Hey. Hey.”

“You’ve been pointing Albert White to our northeastern supply runs.” Joe ejected the .32’s magazine into his palm. He thumbed the top bullet.

Gary said it again. He said, “Hey.”

Joe peered down the sight. He said to Dion, “There’s still one in the chamber.”

“You should always leave one there. In case.”

“In case of what?” Joe jacked the bullet out of the chamber and caught it. He placed it on the desk, the tip pointing at Gary L. Smith.

“I don’t know,” Dion said. “Things you can’t see coming.”

Joe slammed the magazine back into the grip. He snapped a bullet into the chamber and placed the gun on his lap. “I had Dion drive by your house on the way over. You’ve got a nice house. Dion said the neighborhood’s called Hyde Park?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Funny.”

“What?”

“We’ve got a Hyde Park in Boston.”

“Oh. That is funny.”

“Well, it’s not hilarious or anything. Just interesting, kind of.”

“Yes.”

“Stucco?”

“Sorry?”

“Stucco. It’s made of stucco, right?”

“Well, it’s a wood frame, but, yeah, stucco skin.”

“Oh. So I was wrong.”

“No, you weren’t wrong.”

“You said wood.”

“The frame’s wood, but the skin, the surface, that’s, yeah, that’s stucco. So you, yeah, that’s what it is—a stucco house.”

“You like it?”

“Huh?”

“The wood-frame stucco house—do you like it?”

“It’s a little big now that my kids are…”

“What?”

“Grown. They’re gone.”

Joe scratched the back of his head with the barrel of the .32. “You’re going to have to pack it up.”

“I don’t—”

“Or hire someone to pack it up for you.” He shot his eyebrows in the direction of the phone. “They can send the stuff to wherever you end up.”

Smith tried to get back what had left the office fifteen minutes ago, the illusion that he was in control. “End up? I’m not leaving.”

Joe stood and reached into the pocket of his suit jacket. “You fucking her?”

“What? Who?”

Joe jerked his thumb at the door behind him. “Miss Roe.”

Smith said, “What?”

Joe looked at Dion. “He’s fucking her.”

Dion stood. “Without question.”

Joe pulled a pair of train tickets out of his jacket. “She is a work of art, that one. Falling asleep inside of her must be like getting a glimpse of God. After that, you know everything’s going to be all right.”

He placed the tickets on the desk between them.

“I don’t care who you take—your wife, Miss Roe, hell, both of them or neither of them. But you will board the eleven o’clock Seaboard to do it. Tonight, Gary.”

He laughed. It was a short laugh. “I don’t think you under—”

Joe slapped Gary L. Smith across the face so hard he left his chair and banged his head on the radiator.

They waited for him to get off the floor. He righted his chair. He sat in it, all the blood gone from his face now, though some speckled his cheek and lip. Dion tossed a handkerchief at his chest.

“You either put yourself on that train, Gary”—Joe lifted his bullet off the desk—“or we put you under it.”

Heading to the car, Dion said, “You serious about that?”

“Yes.” Joe was irritated again, though not sure why. Sometimes a darkness just came over him. He’d like to say these sudden black moods had been happening only since prison, but the truth was they’d been descending on him since he could remember. Sometimes without reason or warning. But in this case, maybe because Smith had mentioned having children and Joe didn’t like thinking about a man he’d just humiliated having any kind of life outside this job.

“So, if he doesn’t get on that train, you’re prepared to kill him?”

Or maybe simply because he was a dark guy given to dark moods.

“No.” Joe stopped at the car and waited. “Men who work for us will.” He looked at Dion. “What am I, a fucking field hand?”

Dion opened the door for him and Joe climbed inside.

CHAPTER TWELVE Music and Guns

Joe had asked Maso to put him up in a hotel. His first month here, he didn’t want to think about anything but business—that included where his next meal was coming from, how his sheets and clothes got washed, and how long the fella who’d gotten to the bathroom ahead of him was going to stay there. Maso said he’d put him up at the Tampa Bay Hotel, which sounded fine to Joe, if a little unimaginative. He assumed it was a middle-of-the-road place with decent beds, bland but serviceable food, and flat pillows.

Instead, Dion pulled up in front of a lakefront palace. When Joe spoke the thought aloud, Dion said, “That’s actually what they call it—Plant’s Palace.” Henry Plant had built the place, much like he’d built most of Florida, to entice land speculators who’d come down over the past two decades in swarms.

Before Dion could pull up to the front door, a train crossed their path. Not a toy train, though he’d bet they had those here too, but a transcontinental locomotive, a quarter mile long. Joe and Dion sat just short of the parking lot and watched the train disgorge rich men and rich women and their rich children. While they waited, Joe counted more than a hundred windows in the building. At the top of the redbrick walls were several dormers Joe assumed housed the suites. Six minarets rose even higher than the dormers, pointing toward the hard white sky—a Russian winter palace in the middle of dredged Florida swampland.

A swank couple in starched whites left the train. Their three nannies and three swank children followed. Fast on their heels two Negro porters pushed luggage carts piled high with steamer trunks.

“Let’s come back,” Joe said.

“What?” Dion said. “We can park here and walk your bags over. Get you—”

“We’ll come back.” Joe watched the couple stroll inside like they’d grown up in places twice this size. “I don’t want to wait in line.”

Dion looked like he was about to say more on the subject, but then he sighed softly, and they drove back down the road and over small wooden bridges and past a golf course. An older couple sat in a rickshaw pulled by a small Latin guy in a white long-sleeve shirt and white pants. Small wooden signs pointed to the shuffleboard courts, the hunting preserve, canoes, tennis courts, and a racetrack. They drove past the golf course, greener than Joe would have bet in all this heat, and most people they saw wore white and carried parasols, even the men, and their laughter was dry and distant on the air.

He and Dion drove onto Lafayette and into downtown. Dion told Joe the Suarezes went back and forth from Cuba and few knew much about them. Ivelia, it was rumored, had been married to a man who’d died during the sugar workers’ rebellion back in ’12. It was also rumored that the story was a front to disguise her lesbian tendencies.

“Esteban,” Dion said, “owns a lot of companies, both here and over there. Young guy, way younger than his sister. But smart. His father was in business with Ybor himself when Ybor—”

“Wait a minute,” Joe said, “this city’s named after one guy?”

“Yeah,” Dion said, “Vicente Ybor. He was a cigar guy.”

“Now, that,” Joe said, “is power.” He looked out the window and saw Ybor City to the east, handsome from a distance, reminding Joe again of New Orleans, but a much smaller version.

“I dunno,” Dion said, “Coughlin City?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t have a ring to it.”

“No,” Joe agreed, “but Coughlin County?”

Dion chuckled. “You know? That’s not bad.”

“Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“How many sizes your hat go up when you were in prison?” Dion asked.

“Suit yourself,” Joe said, “dream small.”

“How about Coughlin Country? No, hold it, Coughlin Conti-nent.”

Joe laughed and Dion roared and slapped the wheel and Joe was surprised to realize how much he’d missed his friend and how much it would break his heart if he had to order his murder by the end of the week.

Dion drove them down Jefferson toward the courthouses and government buildings. They ran into a snarl of traffic and the heat found the car again.

“Next on the agenda?” Joe asked.

“You want heroin? Morphine? Cocaine?”

Joe shook his head. “Gave them all up for Lent.”

Dion said, “Well, if you ever decide to get hooked, this is the place to come, sport. Tampa, Florida—illegal narcotics center of the South.”

“Chamber of commerce know that?”

“And they’re plenty sore about it. Anyway, reason I bring it up is—”

“Oh, a point,” Joe said.

“I do have them now and again.”

“By all means then, proceed, sir.”

“One of Esteban’s guys, Arturo Torres? He was pinched last week for cocaine. So normally he’d be out half an hour after he went in, but they got this Federal task force sniffing around right now. IRS guys came down beginning of the summer with a bunch of judges, and the furnace got turned on. Arturo is going to be deported.”

“Why do we care?”

“He’s Esteban’s best cooker. ’Round Ybor you see a bottle of rum with Torres’s initials on the cork, it’s gonna cost you double.”

“When’s he supposed to be deported?”

“In about two hours.”

Joe placed his hat over his face and slouched in his seat. He felt exhausted suddenly from the long train ride, the heat, the thinking, that dizzying display of wealthy white people in their wealthy white clothes. “Wake me when we get there.”

After meeting with the judge, they walked from the courthouse to pay a courtesy call on Chief Irving Figgis of the Tampa Police Department.

Headquarters sat on the corner of Florida and Jackson, Joe having oriented himself enough to realize he’d have to pass by it every day as he went from the hotel to work in Ybor. Cops were like nuns that way—always letting you know they were watching.

“He asked you to come to him,” Dion explained as they walked up the steps of headquarters, “so he won’t have to come to you.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s a copper,” Dion said, “so he’s an asshole. Beyond that, he’s okay.”

In his office, Figgis was surrounded by photographs of the same three people—a wife, a son, and a daughter. They were all apple-haired and startlingly attractive. The children had skin so unblemished it was as if angels had scrubbed them clean. The chief shook Joe’s hand, looked him directly in the eye, and asked him to take a seat. Irving Figgis wasn’t a tall man or one of great size or muscle. He was slim and ran small and kept his gray hair trimmed tight to his scalp. He looked like a man who’d give you a fair shake if you gave the same to him, but a man who’d give you twice the hell you’d come looking for if you played him for a fool.

“I won’t insult you by asking the nature of your business,” he said, “so you won’t have to insult me by lying. Fair?”

Joe nodded.

“True you’re a police captain’s son?”

Joe nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“So you understand.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“That this”—he pointed back and forth between his chest and Joe’s—“is how we live. But everything else?” He gestured at all those photographs. “Well, that’s why we live.”

Joe nodded. “And never the twain shall meet.”

Chief Figgis smiled. “Heard you were educated too.” A small glance for Dion. “Don’t find much of that in your trade.”

“Or in yours,” Dion said.

Figgis smiled and tipped his head in acknowledgment. He fixed Joe in a mild gaze. “Before I settled here, I was a soldier and then a U.S. marshal. I’ve killed seven men in my lifetime,” he said without a hint of pride.

Seven? Joe thought. Christ.

Chief Figgis’s gaze remained mild, even. “I killed them because it was my job. I take no pleasure from it and, truth be told, their faces haunt me most nights. But if I had to kill an eighth tomorrow to protect and serve this city? Mister, I would do so with a steady arm and a clear eye. You follow?”

“I do,” Joe said.

Chief Figgis stood by a city map on the wall behind his desk and used his finger to draw a slow circle around Ybor City. “If you keep your business here—north of Second, south of Twenty-seventh, west of Thirty-fourth, and east of Nebraska—you and I will have little in the way of discord.” He gave Joe a small arch of his eyebrow. “How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good,” Joe said, wondering when he’d get around to naming his price.

Chief Figgis saw the question in Joe’s eyes and his own darkened slightly. “I don’t take bribes. If I did, three of those seven dead I mentioned would still be among the living.” He came around to sit on the edge of the desk, spoke in a very low voice. “I have no illusions, young Mr. Coughlin, on how business is transacted in this town. If you were to ask me in private how I feel about Volstead, you’d see me do a pretty fair imitation of a kettle come to boil. I know plenty of my officers take money to look the other way. I know I serve a city swimming in corruption. I know we live in a fallen world. But just because I breathe corrupt air and rub elbows with corrupt people, never make the mistake of believing I am corruptible.”

Joe searched the man’s face for signs of puffery, pride, or self-aggrandizement—the usual weaknesses he’d come to associate with “self-made” men.

Nothing stared back at him but quiet fortitude.

Chief Figgis, he decided, was never to be underestimated.

“I won’t make that mistake,” Joe said.

Chief Figgis held out his hand and Joe shook it.

“I thank you for coming by. Careful in the sun.” A flash of humor passed through Figgis’s face. “That skin of yours could catch fire, I suspect.”

“A pleasure meeting you, Chief.”

Joe went to the door. Dion opened it, and a teenage girl, all breathless energy, stood on the other side. It was the daughter in all the photographs, beautiful and apple-haired, rose gold skin so unblemished it achieved a soft-sun radiance. Joe guessed she was seventeen. Her beauty found his throat, stopped it for a moment, put a catch in the words about to leave his mouth, so all he could manage was a hesitant, “Miss…” Yet it wasn’t a beauty that evoked anything carnal in him. It was somehow purer than that. The beauty of Chief Irving Figgis’s daughter wasn’t something you wanted to despoil, it was something you wanted to beatify.

“Father,” she said, “I apologize. I thought you were alone.”

“That’s all right, Loretta. These gentlemen were leaving. Your manners,” he said.

“Yes, Father, I’m sorry.” She turned and gave Joe and Dion a small curtsy. “Miss Loretta Figgis, gentlemen.”

“Joe Coughlin, Miss Loretta. Pleased to meet you.”

When Joe lightly shook her hand, he felt the strangest urge to genuflect. It stayed with him all afternoon, how pristine she was, how delicate, and how hard it must be to parent something so fragile.

Later that evening, they ate dinner at Vedado Tropicale at a table off to the right of the stage, which gave them a perfect view of the dancers and the band. It was early so the band—a drummer, piano player, trumpeter, and slide trombonist—kept it peppy but didn’t go full bore yet. The dancers wore little more than shifts, pale as ice, the color matching their headgear, which varied. A couple of them wore sequined bandeaux with aigrettes arching out from the center of their foreheads. Others wore silver hairnets with frosted bead rosettes and fringe. They danced with one hand on their hips and one raised to the air or pointing out at the audience. They gave the dinner crowd just enough flesh and gyrations not to offend the missus but to guarantee the mister would return at a later hour.

Joe asked Dion if their dinner was the best in the city.

Dion smiled around a forkful of lechon asado and fried yucca. “In the country.”

Joe smiled. “It’s not bad, I gotta say.” Joe had ordered ropa vieja with black beans and yellow rice. He wiped the plate clean and wished the plate was bigger.

The maître d’ came over and informed them that their coffee was waiting with their hosts. Joe and Dion followed the man across the white tile floor, past the stage, and through a dark velvet curtain. They went down a corridor the cherry oak of rum casks, and Joe wondered if they’d brought a few hundred of them across the Gulf just to make this hallway. They would have had to bring more than a few hundred, actually, because the office was constructed of the same wood.

It was cool in there. The floor was dark stone, and iron ceiling fans hung from the crossbeams, clacking and creaking. The slats of the honey-colored plantation shutters were open to the evening and the infinite hum of dragonflies.

Esteban Suarez was a slim man with unblemished skin the color of weak tea. His eyes were the pale yellow of a cat’s and his hair, slicked back off his forehead, was the color of the dark rum in the bottle on his coffee table. He wore a dinner jacket and black silk bow tie and he came to them with a bright smile and a vigorous handshake. He led them to high wingback armchairs that had been arranged around a copper coffee table. On the table were four tiny cups of Cuban coffee, four water glasses, and the bottle of Suarez Reserve Rum in a weave basket.

Esteban’s sister, Ivelia, rose from her seat and extended her hand. Joe bowed, took her hand, and brushed it lightly with his lips. Her skin smelled of ginger and sawdust. She was much older than her brother, with tight skin over a long jaw and sharp cheekbones and brow. Her thick eyebrows rolled together like a silkworm and her wide eyes seemed trapped in her skull, bulging to escape but helpless to do so.

“How were your meals?” Esteban asked when they sat.

“Excellent,” Joe said. “Thank you.”

Esteban poured them glasses of rum and raised his in toast. “To a fruitful relationship.”

They drank. Joe was stunned by how smooth and rich it was. This is what liquor tasted like when you had more than an hour to distill it, more than a week to ferment it. Christ.

“This is exceptional.”

“It’s the fifteen-year,” Esteban said. “I never agreed with the Spanish mandate from the old days that lighter rum was superior.” He shook his head at the notion and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Of course, we Cubans went along because of our belief that lighter is better in all things—hair, skin, eyes.”

The Suarezes were light-skinned themselves, descended from the Spanish strain, not the African.

“Yes,” Esteban said, reading Joe’s thought. “My sister and I aren’t of the lesser classes. That doesn’t mean we agree with the social order of our island.”

He took another sip of rum and Joe did the same.

Dion said, “Be nice if we could sell this up north.”

Ivelia laughed. It was very sharp and very short. “Someday. When your government treats you like adults again.”

“No rush,” Joe said. “We’d all be out of a job.”

Esteban said, “My sister and I would be fine. We have this restaurant and two in Havana and one in Key West. We have a sugar plantation in Cárdenas and a coffee plantation in Marianao.”

“So why do this at all?”

Esteban shrugged in his perfect dinner jacket. “Money.”

“More money, you mean.”

He raised his glass to that. “There are other things to spend money on besides”—he waved his arm at the room—“things.”

“So says the man with a lot of things,” Dion said, and Joe shot him a look.

Joe noticed for the first time that the west wall of the office was given over entirely to black-and-white photographs—street scenes mostly, the facades of nightclubs, a few faces, a couple of villages so dilapidated they’d fall over in the next wind.

Ivelia followed his gaze. “My brother takes them.”

Joe said, “Yeah?”

Esteban nodded. “On my trips home. It’s a hobby.”

“A hobby,” his sister said with a scoff. “My brother’s photographs have been published in Time magazine.”

Esteban gave it all a diffident shrug.

“They’re good,” Joe said.

“Someday maybe I’ll photograph you, Mr. Coughlin.”

Joe shook his head. “I’m with the Indians on that one, I’m afraid.”

Esteban gave that a wry smile. “Speaking of captured souls, I was sorry to hear of the passing of Senor Ormino last night.”

“Were you?” Dion asked.

Esteban gave that a chuckle so soft it was almost indistinguishable from an exhaled breath. “And friends tell me Gary L. Smith was last seen on the Seaboard Limited with his wife in one Pullman and his puta maestra in another. They say his luggage looked hastily packed but there was a lot of it.”

“Sometimes a change of scenery gives a man a new lease on life,” Joe said.

“Is that the case with you?” Ivelia asked. “Have you come to Ybor for a new life?”

“I’ve come to refine, distill, and distribute the demon rum. But I’m going to have trouble doing that successfully with an erratic import schedule.”

“We don’t control every skiff, every tariff officer, every dock,” Esteban said.

“Sure you do.”

“We don’t control the tides.”

“The tides haven’t slowed the boats to Miami.”

“I don’t have anything to do with boats to Miami.”

“I know.” Joe nodded. “Nestor Famosa does. And he assured my associates that the seas this summer have been calm and predictable. I understand Nestor Famosa is a man of his word.”

“By which you imply I’m not.” Esteban poured them all another glass of rum. “You also bring up Senor Famosa so that I will worry he could overtake my supply routes if you and I aren’t in accord.”

Joe took his glass off the table and sipped the rum. “I bring up Famosa—Jesus, this rum is flawless—to illustrate my point that the seas were calm this summer. Unseasonably calm, I’ve been told. I don’t have a forked tongue, Senor Suarez, and I don’t speak in riddles. Just ask Gary L. Smith. I want to cut out any middlemen and deal with you directly. For that, you can raise your price a bit. I’ll buy all the molasses and sugar you’ve got. I further propose you and I cofinance a better distillery than the ones we’ve got fattening all the rodents along Seventh Avenue. I didn’t just inherit the late Lou Ormino’s responsibilities, I inherited the city councillors, cops, and judges in his pockets. Many of these men won’t talk to you because you’re Cuban, no matter how highly born. You can have access to them through me.”

“Mr. Coughlin, the only reason Senor Ormino had access to those judges and police was because he had Senor Smith as his public face. Those men not only will refuse to do business with a Cuban, but they will also refuse to do business with an Italian. We are all Latin to them, all dark-skinned dogs, good for labor, but little else.”

“Good thing I’m Irish,” Joe said. “I believe you know someone named Arturo Torres.”

A flick of the eyebrows from Esteban.

“I heard he got deported this afternoon,” Joe said.

Esteban said, “I heard that too.”

Joe nodded. “As a gesture of good faith, Arturo was released from jail half an hour ago and is probably downstairs as we speak.”

For one moment, Ivelia’s long flat face grew longer with surprise, even delight. She glanced over at Esteban and he nodded. Ivelia went around his desk to the telephone. While they waited, they sipped some rum.

Ivelia hung up the phone and returned to her seat. “He’s down at the bar.”

Esteban sat back in his chair and held out his hands, eyes on Joe. “You would want exclusive rights to our molasses, I suppose.”

“Not exclusive,” Joe said. “But you can’t sell to the White organization or anyone affiliated with them. Any small operations not associated with them or us can still go about their business. We’ll bring them into the fold eventually.”

“And for this I get access to your politicians and your police.”

Joe nodded. “And my judges. Not just the ones we have now but the ones we’ll get.”

“The judge you reached today was federally appointed.”

“And has three children with a Negro woman in Ocala that his wife and Herbert Hoover would be surprised to learn about.”

Esteban looked at his sister for a long time before turning back to Joe. “Albert White is a good customer. Has been for some time.”

“Has been for two years,” Joe said. “Ever since someone cut Clive Green’s throat in a whorehouse on East Twenty-fourth.”

Esteban raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve been in prison since March of ’27, Senor Suarez. I’ve had nothing to do but my homework. Can Albert White offer you what I’m offering?”

“No,” Esteban admitted. “But to cut him out would bring me a war I can’t afford. I simply can’t. I would have liked to have met you two years ago.”

“Well, you’re meeting me now,” Joe said. “I’ve offered you judges, police, politicians, and a distilling model that’s centralized so we both share all the profits evenly. I’ve weeded out the two weakest links in my organization and kept your prized liquor cook from being deported. I did all this so you would consider ending your embargo on the Pescatore operation in Ybor because I thought you were sending us a message. I’m here to tell you I heard the message. And if you tell me what you need, I’ll get it. But you must give me what I need.”

Another look between Esteban and his sister.

“There’s something you could get us,” she said.

“Okay.”

“But it’s well guarded and won’t be given up without a fight.”

“Fine, fine,” Joe said. “We’ll get it.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“If we get it, will you cut all ties with Albert White and his associates?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it brings bloodshed.”

“It will most certainly bring bloodshed,” Esteban said.

“Yes,” Joe said, “it will.”

Esteban mourned the thought for a moment, the sadness filling the room. Then he sucked it right back out of the room. “If you do what I ask, Albert White will never see another drop of Suarez molasses or distilled rum. Not one.”

“Will he be able to buy sugar in bulk from you?”

“No.”

“Deal,” Joe said. “What do you need?”

“Guns.”

“Okay. Name your model.”

Esteban reached behind him and took a piece of paper off his desk. He adjusted his glasses as he consulted it. “Browning automatic rifles, automatic handguns, and fifty-caliber machine guns with mounting tripods.”

Joe looked at Dion and they both chuckled.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Esteban said. “Grenades. And box mines.”

“What’s a box mine?”

Esteban said, “It’s on the ship.”

“What ship?”

“The military transport ship,” Ivelia said. “Pier Seven.” She tilted her head toward the rear wall. “Nine blocks from here.”

“You want us to raid a navy ship,” Joe said.

“Yes.” Esteban looked at his watch. “Within two days, please, or they leave port.” He handed Joe a folded piece of paper. As Joe opened it, he felt a hollowing of his center, and he remembered how he’d carried notes like these to his father. He’d spent two years telling himself the weight of those notes hadn’t killed his father. Some nights he almost convinced himself.

Circulo Cubano, 8 A.M.

“You’ll go there in the morning,” Esteban said. “You’ll meet a woman there, Graciela Corrales. You’ll take your orders from her and her partner.”

Joe pocketed the paper. “I don’t take orders from a woman.”

“If you want Albert White out of Tampa,” Esteban said, “you’ll take orders from her.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Hole of the Heart

Dion drove Joe to his hotel a second time, and Joe told him to stick around until he decided whether or not he was staying in tonight.

The bellman was dressed like a circus monkey in a red velvet tux and matching fez, and he swooped out from behind a potted palm on the veranda and took Joe’s suitcases from Dion’s hand and led Joe inside while Dion waited at the car. Joe checked in at a marble reception desk and signed the ledger with a gold fountain pen handed to him by a severe Frenchman with a brilliant smile and eyes as dead as a doll’s. He was handed a brass key tied to a short length of red velvet rope. At the other end of the rope was a heavy gold square with this room number on it: 509.

It was a suite, actually, with a bed the size of South Boston and delicate French chairs and a delicate French desk overlooking the lake. He had his own bathroom, all right; it was bigger than his cell in Charlestown. The bellman showed him where the outlets were and how to turn on the lamps and the ceiling fans. He showed him the cedar closet where Joe could hang his clothes. He showed him the radio, complimentary in every room, and it made Joe think of Emma and the grand opening of the Hotel Statler. He tipped the bellman and shooed him out and sat in one of the delicate French chairs and smoked a cigarette and looked out at the dark lake and the massive hotel reflected in it, squares and squares of light tilted sideways on the black surface, and he wondered what his father could see right now and what Emma could see. Could they see him? Could they see the past and the future or vast worlds far beyond his imaginings? Or could they see nothing? Because they were nothing. They were dead, they were dust, bones in a box and Emma’s not even attached.

He feared this was all there was. Didn’t just fear it. Sitting in that ridiculous chair looking out the window at the yellow windows canted in the black water, he knew it. You didn’t die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren’t dead. Heaven wasn’t in the clouds; it was the air in your lungs.

He looked around the room with its high ceilings and chandelier over the enormous bed and curtains as thick as his thigh and he wanted to come out of his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to his father, even though he knew he couldn’t hear him, “it wasn’t supposed to be”—he looked around the room again—“this.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and left.

Outside of Ybor, Tampa was strictly white. Dion showed him a few places above Twenty-fourth Street with wooden signs stating their position on the matter. A grocery store on Nineteenth Avenue wanted it known that NO DOGS OR LATINS were allowed and a druggist on Columbus had a NO LATINS on the left side of his door and NO DAGOS on the right.

Joe looked at Dion. “You all right with that?”

“Of course not, but what’re you going to do?”

Joe took a hit off Dion’s flask and passed it back to him. “Gotta be some rocks around here.”

It had started to rain, which did nothing to cool things off. Down here, rain felt like more sweat. It was close to midnight, and things just seemed hotter, the humidity a woolen embrace around everything you did. Joe got into the driver’s seat and kept the engine idling while Dion shattered both of the druggist windows and then hopped into the car and they drove back into Ybor. Dion explained that the Italians lived around here, in the higher-numbered streets between Fifteenth and Twenty-third. The lighter spics were between Tenth and Fifteenth, the nigger spics below Tenth Street and west of Twelfth Avenue, where most of the cigar factories were.

They found a joint down there at the end of an almost-road that went past the Vayo Cigar Factory and vanished into a cowl of mangrove and cypress. It was nothing more than a shotgun shack on stilts overlooking a swamp. They’d strung netting from the trees along the banks, and the netting covered the shack and the cheap wood tables beside it and the porch out back.

They played some music in there. Joe had never heard anything quite like it—Cuban rumba, he guessed, but brassier and more dangerous, and the people on the dance floor were doing something that looked far more like fucking than dancing. Most everyone in there was colored—some American black, mostly Cuban black, though—and those who were merely brown didn’t have the Indian features of the highborn Cubans or the Spaniards. Their faces were rounder, their hair more wiry. Half the people knew Dion. The bartender, an older woman, gave him a jug of rum and two glasses without him asking.

“You the new boss?” she asked Joe.

“I guess I am,” Joe said. “I’m Joe. And you are?”

“Phyllis.” She slipped a dry hand into his. “This is my place.”

“It’s nice. What’s it called?”

“Phyllis’s Place.”

“Of course.”

“What do you think of him?” Dion asked Phyllis.

“He too pretty,” she said and looked at Joe. “Someone need to mess you up.”

“We’ll get to work on that.”

“See you do,” she said and went to serve another customer.

They took the bottle out onto the back porch and set it on a small table and took residence in two rocking chairs. They looked out through the netting at the swamp as the rain stopped falling and the dragonflies returned. Joe heard something heavy moving through the brush. And something else, just as heavy, moved underneath the porch.

“Reptiles,” Dion said.

Joe lifted his feet off the porch. “What?”

“Alligators,” Dion repeated.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“No,” Dion said, “but they will.”

Joe raised his knees higher. “What the fuck are we doing in a place with alligators?”

Dion shrugged. “You can’t escape ’em down here. They’re everywhere. You see water, there’s ten of ’em in there, big eyes watching.” He wiggled his fingers and bugged his eyes. “Waiting for dumb Yankees to come take a dip.”

Joe heard the one below him slither away and then crash through the mangrove again. He didn’t know what to say.

Dion chuckled. “Just don’t go in the water.”

“Or near it,” Joe said.

“That too.”

They sat on the porch and drank and the last of the rain clouds drifted off. The moon returned and Joe could see Dion as clearly as if they were inside. He found his old friend staring at him, so he stared back. For quite a while, neither of them said a word, but Joe felt a whole conversation pass between them nonetheless. He was relieved, and he knew Dion was too, to finally get on with it.

Dion took a swig of the rotgut rum, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “How’d you know it was me?”

Joe said, “Because I knew it wasn’t me.”

“Could’ve been my brother.”

“May he rest in peace,” Joe said, “but your brother wasn’t smart enough to double-cross a street.”

Dion nodded and looked down at his shoes for a bit. “It’d be a blessing.”

“What’s that?”

“Dying.” Dion looked at him. “I got my brother killed, Joe. You know what living with that’s like?”

“I have some idea.”

“How could you?”

“Trust me,” Joe said. “I do.”

“He was older than me by two years,” Dion said, “but I was the older brother, get me? I was supposed to look out for him. ’Member when we all first started palling around, knocking over newsstands, Paolo and me had that other little brother, called him Seppi?”

Joe nodded. Funny, he hadn’t thought of the kid in years. “Got the polio.”

Dion nodded. “Died, he was eight? My mother was never right again after that. I said to Paolo at the time, you know, we couldn’t do nothing to save Seppi; that was just God and God gets his way. But each other?” He twisted his thumbs together, raised his fists to his lips. “We would protect each other.”

Behind them the shack thumped with bodies and bass. In front of them mosquitoes rose off the swamp like claps of dust and found the moonlight.

“So what now? You requested me from prison. You had them find me in Montreal and pull me all the way down here, give me a good living. And for what?”

“Why’d you do it?” Joe asked.

“Because he asked me to.”

“Albert?” Joe whispered.

“Who else?”

Joe closed his eyes for a moment. He reminded himself to breathe slowly. “He asked you to rat us all out?”

“Yeah.”

“He pay you?”

“Fuck no. He offered, but I wouldn’t take his fucking money. Fuck him.”

“You still work for him?”

“No.”

“Why would you tell the truth, D?”

Dion removed a switchblade from his boot. He placed it on the small table between them and followed it with two .38 long-barrels and one .32 snub-nose. He added a lead sap and brass knuckles, then wiped his hands clean of them and showed his palms to Joe.

“After I’m gone,” he said, “ask around Ybor about a guy named Brucie Blum. You’ll see him down around Sixth Avenue sometimes. He walks funny, talks funny, has no idea he used to be big noise. He used to work for Albert. Just six months ago. Big hit with the ladies, had himself some nice suits. Now he shuffles around with a cup, begging for change, pisses himself, can’t tie his own fucking shoes. Last thing he did when he was still big noise? He come up to me in a blind pig over on Palm? He says, ‘Albert needs to talk to you. Or else, see.’ So I chose ‘or else’ and beat his fucking head in. So, no, I don’t work for Albert no more. It was a onetime job. Just ask Brucie Blum.”

Joe sipped the awful rum and said nothing.

“You going to do it yourself or get someone else to do it?”

Joe met his eyes. “I’ll kill you myself.”

“Okay.”

“If I kill you.”

“I’d appreciate you make up your mind about it, one way or the other.”

“Don’t much give a shit what you’d appreciate, D.”

Now it was Dion’s time to be silent. The thumps and the bass grew softer behind them. More and more cars left the grounds and headed back up the mud path toward the cigar factory.

“My father’s gone,” Joe said eventually. “Emma’s dead. Your brother’s dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you’re one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?”

Dion stared at him, the tears rolling down his fat face like beads.

“So you didn’t betray me for money,” Joe said. “So why then?”

“You were gonna get us all killed,” he said eventually, sucking air up from the floor. “The girl. You weren’t yourself. Even that day at the bank. You were gonna get us into something we couldn’t get out of. And my brother would have been the one to die, because he was slow, Joe. He wasn’t us. I figured, I figured…” He sucked in a few more breaths. “I figured I’d get us all off the street for a year. That was the deal. Albert knew a judge. We were all going to get a year, that’s why we never pulled guns during the job. One year. Long enough for Albert’s girl to forget you and maybe you’d forget her.”

“Jesus,” Joe said. “All this because I fell for the man’s girlfriend?”

“You and Albert were both bugs when it came to her. You couldn’t see it, but once she came into the picture, you were gone. And I’ll never understand it. She was no different than a million dames.”

“No,” Joe said, “she was.”

“How? What didn’t I see?”

Joe finished the rest of his rum. “Before I met her? I didn’t realize there was this bullet hole right in the center of me.” He tapped his chest. “Right here. Didn’t realize it until she came along and filled it. Now she’s dead and the hole’s back. But it’s grown to the size of a milk bottle. And it keeps growing. And I just want her to come back from the dead and fill it.”

Dion stared at him as the tears dried on his face. “From the outside looking in, Joe? She was the hole.”

Back at the hotel, the night manager came from behind the desk and handed Joe a series of messages. They were all calls from Maso.

“Do you have a twenty-four operator?” Joe asked him.

“Of course, sir.”

When he got to his room, he called down and the operator patched him through. The phone rang on the North Shore of Boston and Maso answered it. Joe had a cigarette and told him all about the long day.

“A ship?” Maso said. “They want you to hit a ship?”

“Navy ship,” Joe said. “Yeah.”

“What about the other thing? You get your answer?”

“I got my answer.”

“And?”

“It wasn’t Dion ratted me out.” Joe removed his shirt, dropped it to the floor. “It was his brother.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Boom

The Circulo Cubano was the most recent of Ybor’s social clubs. The Spaniards had built the first, Centro Español, on Seventh Avenue back in the 1890s. At the turn of the century, a group of northern Spaniards had splintered from the Centro Español to form Centro Asturiano on the corner of Ninth and Nebraska.

The Italian Club was a couple blocks down Seventh from the Centro Español, both addresses prime Ybor real estate. The Cubans, though, in keeping with their lowly status in the community, had to settle for a far less fashionable block. The Circulo Cubano sat on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Across the street was a seamstress and a pharmacist, both marginally respectable, but next door was Silvana Padilla’s whorehouse, which catered to the cigar workers, not the managers, so knife fights were common and the whores were often sick and unkempt.

As Dion and Joe pulled to the curb, a whore in last night’s wrinkled dress came out of an alley two doors up. She walked past them, smoothing her flounces and looking broken and very old and in need of a drink. Joe guessed she was about eighteen. The guy who came out of the alley after her wore a suit and a white skimmer and walked in the opposite direction, whistling, and Joe had the irrational urge to get out of the car, chase the guy down, and bang his head off one of the brick buildings lining Fourteenth. Bang it until blood rushed out of his ears.

“We own that?” Joe indicated the whorehouse with a tilt of his chin.

“We own a piece.”

“Then our piece says the girls don’t do alley work.”

Dion looked at him to be sure he was serious. “Fine. I’ll look into it, Father Joe. Can we concentrate on the issue at hand?”

“I’m concentrating.” Joe checked his tie in the rearview mirror and got out of the car. They walked up a sidewalk already so hot at eight in the morning he felt it in the soles of his feet even though he wore good shoes. The heat made it harder to think. And Joe needed to think. Plenty of other guys were tougher, braver, and better with a gun, but he’d match wits with any man and feel he had a fighting chance. It would help, though, if someone dropped by to shut off the fucking heat.

Concentrate. Concentrate. You are about to be presented with a problem that you have to fix. How do you relieve the U.S. Navy of sixty crates of weaponry without them killing or maiming you?

As they walked up the steps of the Circulo Cubano a woman came out the front door to greet them.

The truth was, Joe did have an idea about how to remove the weapons, but now it went right out of his head because he was looking at the woman and she was looking at him, recognition blossoming. It was the woman he’d seen on the train platform yesterday, the one with skin the color of brass and long thick hair as black as anything Joe had ever seen except, perhaps, her eyes, which were just as dark and locked on him as he approached.

“Senor Coughlin?” She held out a hand.

“Yes.” He shook her hand.

“Graciela Corrales.” She slipped her hand out of his. “You’re late.”

She led them inside across a black and white tile floor to a white marble staircase. It was much cooler in here, the high ceilings and dark wood paneling and all the tile and marble managing to keep the heat at bay for a few hours longer.

Graciela Corrales spoke with her back to Joe and Dion. “You are from Boston, yes?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Do all men from Boston leer at women on train platforms?”

“We try to stop short of making a career out of it.”

She looked back over her shoulder at them. “It’s very rude.”

Dion said, “I’m originally from Italy.”

“Another rude place.” She led them through a ballroom at the top of the stairs, pictures on the wall of various groups of Cubans gathered in this very room. Some of the shots were posed, others catching the feel of the dance nights in full bloom, arms flung in the air, hips cocked, skirts twirling. They moved quickly, but Joe was pretty sure he saw Graciela in one of the photos. He couldn’t be certain because the woman in the photo was laughing, with her head thrown back, and her hair down, and he couldn’t imagine this woman with her hair down.

Past the ballroom was a billiards parlor, Joe starting to think some Cubans lived pretty well, and past the billiards parlor was a library with heavy white curtains and four wooden chairs. The man waiting for them approached with a broad smile and a vigorous handshake.

Esteban. He shook their hands as if they hadn’t met last night.

“Esteban Suarez, gentlemen. Good of you to come. Sit, sit.”

They took their seats.

Dion said, “Are there two of you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“We spent an hour with you last night. You shake our hands like we’re strangers.”

“Well, last night you met the owner of El Vedado Tropicale. This morning you meet the recording secretary of Circulo Cubano.” He smiled as if he were a teacher humoring two schoolchildren who’d likely repeat the grade. “Anyway,” he said, “thank you for your help.”

Joe and Dion nodded but said nothing.

“I have thirty men,” Esteban said, “but I estimate I’ll need thirty more. How many can you—”

Joe said, “We’re not committing any men. We’re not committing to anything.”

“No?” Graciela looked at Esteban. “I’m confused.”

“We’ve come to hear you out,” Joe said. “Whether we get involved from that point remains to be seen.”

Graciela took her seat beside Esteban. “Please don’t act like you have a choice. You’re gangsters who depend on a product supplied by one man and one man only. If you refuse us, your supply dries up.”

“In which case,” Joe said, “we go to war. And we’ll win, because we’ve got numbers and, Esteban, you don’t. I’ve looked into it. You want me to risk my life against the United States military? I’ll take my chances against a few dozen Cubans on the streets of Tampa. At least I know what I’ll be fighting for.”

“Profit,” Graciela said.

Joe said, “A way to make a living.”

“A criminal way.”

“What do you do?” He leaned forward, his eyes scanning the room. “Sit around here, counting your Oriental rugs?”

“I roll cigars, Mr. Coughlin, at La Trocha. I sit in a wooden chair and do this from ten every morning until eight every evening. When you leered at me on the platform yesterday—”

“I didn’t leer at you.”

“—that was my first day off in two weeks. And when I’m not working, I volunteer here.” She gave him a bitter smile. “So don’t let the pretty dress fool you.”

The dress was even more threadbare than the one she’d worn yesterday. It was cotton with a gypsy girdle straddling a flounced skirt, at least a year out of style, maybe two, washed and worn so many times it had traded its original color for something not-quite-white, not-quite-tan.

“Donations paid for this club,” Esteban said smoothly. “Its doors are kept open the same way. When Cubans go out on a Friday night, they want to go to a place where they can dress up, a place that makes them feel like they are back in Havana, a place with style. Pizzazz, yes?” He snapped his fingers. “In here, nobody calls us spics or mud men. We are free to speak our language and sing our songs and recite our poetry.”

“Well, that’s nice. Why don’t you tell me why I should poetically raid a navy transport ship on your behalf rather than just overthrow your whole organization?”

Graciela opened her mouth at that, eyes aflame, but Esteban stopped her with a hand to her knee. “You’re correct—you could probably overthrow my operation. But what would you get but a few buildings? My supply routes, my contacts in Havana, all the people I work with in Cuba—they would never work with you. So, do you really want to kill the golden goose for some buildings and a few old cases of rum?”

Joe met his smile with one of his own. They were starting to understand each other. They didn’t respect each other yet, but the possibility was there.

Joe jerked his thumb behind him. “You take those photos in the hallway?”

“Most of them.”

“What don’t you do, Esteban?”

Esteban removed his hand from Graciela’s knee and sat back. “Do you know much about Cuban politics, Mr. Coughlin?”

“No,” Joe said, “and I don’t need to. It won’t help me get this job done.”

Esteban crossed his ankles. “How about Nicaragua?”

“We put down a rebellion there a few years back, if I remember right.”

“That’s where the weapons are going,” Graciela said. “And there was no rebellion. Your country occupies theirs just like they occupy mine when they see fit.”

“Take it up with the Platt Amendment.”

That put a rise in one of her eyebrows. “An educated gangster?”

“I’m not a gangster, I’m an outlaw,” he said, although he wasn’t sure that was true anymore. “And there’s not much else to do where I’ve spent the last two years but read. So why’s the navy running guns to Nicaragua?”

“They’ve opened a military training school there,” Esteban said. “To train the armies and police of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama, of course, how to best remind the peasants of their place.”

Joe said, “So you’re going to steal weapons from the U.S. Navy and reapportion them to Nicaraguan rebels?”

“Nicaragua is not my fight,” Esteban said.

“So you’re going to arm Cuban rebels.”

A nod. “Machado is no president. He is a common thief with a gun.”

“So you’ll steal from our military to overthrow your military?”

Esteban gave that a small tip of his head.

Graciela said, “Does it bother you?”

“Don’t mean shit to me.” Joe looked over at Dion. “Bother you?”

Dion asked Graciela, “You ever think if you people could police yourselves, maybe pick a leader who didn’t loot you six ways from Sunday five minutes after getting sworn in, we wouldn’t have to keep occupying you?”

Graciela fixed him in a flat stare. “I think if we didn’t have a cash crop you wanted for yourselves, you’d have never heard of Cuba.”

Dion looked over at Joe. “What do I care? Let’s hear this plan.”

Joe turned to Esteban. “You do have a plan, don’t you?”

Esteban’s eyes registered offense for the first time. “We have a man who will be calling on the boat tonight. He’ll cause a diversion in a forward compartment and—”

“What kind of diversion?” Dion asked.

“A fire. When they go to put it out, we’ll go down to the hold and pull out the weapons.”

“The hold will be locked.”

Esteban gave them a confident smile. “We have bolt cutters for that.”

“You’ve seen the lock?”

“It’s been described to me.”

Dion leaned forward. “But you don’t know what kind of material it’s made of. It could be stronger than your bolt cutters.”

“Then we will shoot it.”

“Which will alert the people fighting the fire,” Joe said. “And probably get somebody killed by a ricochet.”

“We will move fast.”

“How fast can anyone move with sixty boxes of rifles and grenades?”

“We’ll have thirty men. Thirty more men, if you provide them.”

“They’ll have three hundred,” Joe said.

“But they won’t be three hundred Cubanos. The American soldier fights for his own pride. The Cubano fights for his country.”

“Jesus,” Joe said.

Esteban’s smile got even more smug. “You doubt our bravery?”

“No,” Joe said. “I doubt your intelligence.”

“I’m not afraid to die,” Esteban said.

“I am.” Joe lit a cigarette. “And if I wasn’t, I’d like to die for a better reason than this. It takes two guys to lift a crate of rifles. That means sixty guys would have to make two trips onto a burning naval ship. And you think this is possible?”

“We only learned about the ship two days ago,” Graciela said. “If we had more time we could have more men and a better plan, but that ship leaves tomorrow.”

“Doesn’t have to,” Joe said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you can get a guy on the ship.”

“Yes.”

“That mean you already got an inside guy on there?”

“Why?”

“Jesus, because I fucking asked you, all right, Esteban? Do you have one of the sailors on your payroll or not?”

“We do,” Graciela said.

“What’re his duties?”

“Engine room.”

“What was he going to do for you?”

“Cause an engine malfunction.”

“So your outside guy, he’s a mechanic?”

A pair of nods.

“He comes in to fix the engine, starts the fire, you raid the weapons hold.”

Esteban said, “Yes.”

“As plans go, it’s not half bad,” Joe said.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. If half a plan isn’t bad, it means the other half is. When were you going to do this?”

“Tonight,” Esteban said. “Ten o’clock. The moon’s supposed to be quite weak.”

Joe said, “Middle of the night, more like three in the morning, would be ideal. Most everyone will be asleep. No heroes to worry about, few witnesses. That’s the only chance I see of your man making it back off that boat.” He laced his hands behind his head, gave it a bit more thought. “Your mechanic, he Cuban?”

“Yes.”

“How dark?”

Esteban said, “I don’t see—”

“Does he look more like you or more like her?”

“He’s very light-skinned.”

“So he could pass for Spanish.”

Esteban looked at Graciela, then back at Joe. “Certainly.”

“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.”

The 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.”

The 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.”

Joe 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.”

The 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.

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

At 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.”

They 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.

Joe 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.”

On the road, Dion said, “Hey, I don’t like hitting ’em either but sometimes it’s all a dame respects.”

“I didn’t hit her because she had it coming,” Joe said.

“No, you hit her to help her get her hands on a bunch of BARs and Thompsons to send back to all her little friends on Sin Island.” Dion shrugged. “It’s a shitty business, so we do shitty things. She asked you to get the guns. You came up with a way to get them.”

“Ain’t got ’em yet,” Joe said.

They pulled to the side of the road one last time for Joe to change into his uniform. Dion rapped his hand on the wall between the cab and the back of the truck and said, “Everybody be as quiet as cats when the dogs are around. ¿Comprende?”

From the back of the truck came a chorus of “Sí,” and then the only thing they could hear were the ever-present insects in the trees.

“You ready?” Joe said.

Dion slapped the side of the door. “Why I get up every morning, chum.”

The National Guard Armory was way up in unincorporated Tampa, at the northern edge of Hillsborough County, a harsh landscape of citrus groves and cypress swamps and broom sage fields gone dry and brittle in the sun, waiting for the chance to burn and turn the whole county black with the smoke.

Two guards manned the gate, one armed with a Colt .45, the other with a Browning automatic rifle, the very items they’d come to steal. The guard with the sidearm was tall and lanky with dark spiky hair and the sunken cheeks of a very old man or a very young man with bad teeth. The boy with the BAR was barely out of diapers; he had burnt orange hair and dull eyes. Black pimples covered his face like pepper.

He was no problem, but the lanky one worried Joe. Something about him was too coiled and too keen. He took his time when he looked at you and he didn’t care what you thought about it.

“You the ones got blowed up?” His teeth, as Joe had guessed, were gray and slanted, several tipping back into his mouth like old headstones in a flooded graveyard.

Dion nodded. “Put a hole in our hull.”

The lanky boy looked past Joe at Dion. “Shit, tubby, how much you pay to pass your last FITREP?”

The short one left the shack with his BAR cradled lazily in his arm, the barrel slanting across his hip. He started down the side of the truck, his mouth half open like he was hoping it would rain.

The one by the door said, “I asked you a question, tubby.”

Dion smiled pleasantly. “Fifty bucks.”

“That what you paid?”

“Yep,” Dion said.

“Got yourself a bargain. And who was that you paid, exactly?”

“What’s that?”

“Name and rank of the man you paid,” the boy said.

“Chief Petty Officer Brogan,” Dion said. “Why, you thinking of joining?”

The guy blinked and gave them both a cold smile but said nothing, just stood there while the smile evaporated. “Don’t accept bribes myself.”

“All right,” Joe said, his nerves getting the better of him.

“All right?”

Joe nodded and resisted the urge to smile like a fool, show the guy how nice he was.

“I know it’s all right. I know.”

Joe waited.

“I know it’s all right,” the guy repeated. “Gave you the impression I needed your counsel on the matter?”

Joe said nothing.

“I did not,” the boy said.

Something thumped in the back of the truck and the boy looked back there for his partner and when he looked at Joe again Joe placed his Savage .32 against the boy’s nose.

The kid’s eyes crossed to stare at the gun barrel and his breathing came heavy and long through his mouth. Dion came out of the truck and around to the boy and relieved him of his sidearm.

“Man with teeth like yours,” Dion said, “should not be remarking on the flaws of others. Man with teeth like yours should just keep his mouth shut.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy whispered.

“What’s your name?”

“Perkin, sir.”

“Well, Perkinsir,” Dion said, “me and my partner will at some point discuss whether we let you live today. If we decide in your favor, you’ll know ’cause you ain’t dead. If we don’t, it’ll be to teach you you should have been nicer to people. Now put your fucking hands behind your back.”

Pescatore gangsters came out of the back of the truck first—four of them in summer suits and florid ties. They pushed the orange-haired boy ahead of them, Sal Urso pointing the kid’s own rifle at his back, the boy blubbering that he didn’t want to die today, not today. The Cubans, about thirty of them, came out after them, most of them dressed in the white drawstring pants and white shirts with the bell-hemlines that reminded Joe of pajamas. They all carried rifles or pistols. One carried a machete and another carried two large knives at the ready. Esteban led them. He wore a dark green tunic and matching trousers, the field outfit of choice, Joe assumed, for banana republic revolutionaries. He nodded at Joe as he and his men entered the grounds and then spread out around the back of the building.

“How many men inside?” Joe asked Perkin.

“Fourteen.”

“How come so few?”

“Middle of the week. You come here on a weekend?” A little bit of mean returned to his eyes. “You’d have met some men.”

“I’m sure I would have.” Joe climbed out of the truck. “Right now though, Perkin, I’ll have to settle for you.”

The only guy to put up a fight when he saw thirty armed Cubans flood the halls of the armory was a giant. Six and a half feet tall, Joe guessed. Maybe taller. A huge head and a long jaw and shoulders like crossbeams. He rushed three Cubans who were under orders not to shoot. They shot anyway. Didn’t hit the giant. Missed him clean from twenty feet away. Hit another Cuban instead. A guy who’d been rushing up behind the giant.

Joe and Dion were right behind the Cuban when he got shot. He spun and toppled in front of them like a bowling pin and Joe shouted, “Stop shooting!”

Dion screamed, “¡Dejar de disparar! ¡Dejar de disparar!”

They stopped, but Joe couldn’t be sure if they were just reloading their creaky bolt-action rifles or not. He grabbed the rifle from the one who’d been shot, grabbed it by the barrel and cocked his arm as the giant rose from the defensive crouch he’d adopted when they started shooting at him. Joe swung the rifle into the side of his head, and the giant bounced off the wall and came for him, arms flailing. Joe changed his grip and drove the butt of the rifle through the flurry of the guy’s arms and into his nose. He heard it break, heard his cheekbone break with it as the butt slid off his face. Joe dropped the rifle when the big man hit the ground. He pulled handcuffs from his pocket and Dion got one of the guy’s wrists and Joe got the other and they cuffed them behind his back as he took a lot of huffing breaths, his blood pooling on the floor.

“You gonna live?” Joe asked him.

“Gonna kill you.”

“Sounds like you’re gonna live.” Joe turned to the three trigger-happy Cubans. “Get another guy and take this one to the cells.”

He looked at the one they’d shot. He was curled on the floor, mouth open and gasping. He didn’t sound good and he didn’t look good—marble white, way too much blood flowing from his midsection. Joe knelt by him, but in the moment it took to do so, the boy died. His eyes were open and tilted up and to the right, as if he were trying to remember his wife’s birthday or where he’d left his wallet. He lay on his side, one arm pinned awkwardly beneath him, the other splayed up and behind his head. His shirt had bunched up at his ribs and left his abdomen exposed.

The three men who’d killed him blessed themselves as they dragged the giant past him and Joe.

When Joe closed the boy’s eyelids, he looked quite young. He might have been twenty, or he could have been as young as sixteen. Joe rolled him onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest. Below his hands, just below the steeple where his lowest ribs met, dark blood climbed from a hole in him the size of a dime.

Dion and his men lined the National Guardsmen up against the wall and Dion told them to strip to their skivvies.

The dead boy had a wedding ring on his finger. Looked to be made of tin. Probably had a picture of her on him somewhere, but Joe wasn’t going to look for it.

He was also missing one of his shoes. It must have come off when he was shot, but damned if Joe could see it near the corpse. As they marched the Guardsmen past him in their underwear, he searched the corridor for the shoe.

No luck. It might have been under the boy. Joe thought of rolling the body again to check—it seemed important to find it—but he was due back at the gate and he needed to change into another uniform.

He felt watched by bored or indifferent gods as he pulled the boy’s shirt back over his abdomen and left him lying there, one shoe on, one shoe off, in his own blood.

The guns arrived five minutes later when the truck pulled up to the gate. The driver was a seaman no older than the boy Joe had just watched die, but riding shotgun was a petty officer in his midthirties with a permanently windburned face. He had a ’17 Colt .45 riding his hip, the butt weathered from use. One look in his pale eyes and Joe knew that if those three Cubans had charged him in that corridor, they’d be the ones lying on the ground with sheets over them.

The IDs they handed over identified them as Seaman Apprentice Orwitt Pluff and Petty Officer Walter Craddick. Joe handed the IDs back with the signed orders Craddick had given him.

Craddick gave that a cock of his head, left Joe’s hand hanging in the space between them. “That’s for your CO’s files.”

“Right.” Joe withdrew his hand. He gave them an apologetic smile, not putting much into it. “A little too much fun last night in Ybor. You know how that is.”

“No, I don’t.” Craddick shook his head. “I don’t drink. It’s against the law.” He looked out the windshield. “We backing up to that ramp?”

“Yes,” Joe said. “You want, you can off-load it and we’ll take it all inside.”

Craddick took note of the chevrons on Joe’s shoulder. “Our orders are to deliver and secure the weapons, Corporal. We’ll be walking them all the way into the hold.”

“Outstanding,” Joe said. “Just back it up to the ramp.” He raised the gate, catching Dion’s eyes as he did so. Dion said something to Lefty Downer, the smartest of the four guys he’d brought along, and then walked off toward the armory.

Joe, Lefty, and the other three Pescatore men, all four dressed as corporals, followed the truck to the loading ramp. Lefty had been chosen because he was smart and didn’t lose his cool. The other three—Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone—had been picked because they spoke English without an accent. For the most part, they looked like weekend soldiers, although Joe noted as they crossed the lot that Parone’s hair was too long, even for a Guardsman.

He hadn’t slept properly, if at all, in two days and he could feel it now in every step he took, every thought he tried to formulate.

As the truck backed up to the ramp, he saw Craddick watching him, and he wondered if the older man was just naturally suspicious or if Joe had given him a reason to be. And then Joe realized something that nauseated him.

He’d abandoned his post.

He’d left the gate unmanned. No soldier would do that, not even a hungover National Guardsman.

He glanced back, expecting to see it empty, expecting a shot in the back from Craddick’s .45 and the peal of alarms, but instead he saw Esteban Suarez standing erect in the guard shack, wearing a corporal’s uniform, looking to all but the most curious eyes every inch the soldier.

Esteban, Joe thought, I barely know you but I could kiss your head.

Joe glanced back at the truck, saw that Craddick wasn’t looking at him any longer. He was turned on the seat, saying something to the seaman apprentice as the boy applied the brake and then shut off the engine.

Craddick hopped from the cab and shouted orders to the back of the truck, and by the time Joe got there, the sailors were out on the ramp and the tailgate was down.

Craddick handed Joe a clipboard. “Initial the first and third pages, sign the second. Clearly states that we are leaving these weapons in your charge for no less than three and no more than thirty-six hours.”

Joe signed “Albert White, SSG, USANG,” initialed where appropriate, and handed it back.

Craddick looked at Lefty, Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone, then back at Joe. “Five men? That’s all you got?”

“We were told you were bringing the muscle.” Joe gestured at the dozen sailors on the ramp.

“Just like the army,” Craddick said, “putting its feet up when the work gets tough.”

Joe blinked in the sun. “That why you guys were late—you were working hard?”

“’Scuse me?”

Joe squared off, not just because his blood was up, but because not to do so would look suspicious. “You were supposed to be here half an hour ago.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Craddick said, “and we were delayed.”

“By?”

“Fail to see how any of this is your business, Corporal.” Craddick stepped up close. “But, in truth, we were delayed by a woman.”

Joe looked back at Lefty and his men and laughed. “Women can be hard work.”

Lefty chuckled and the others followed suit.

“All right, all right.” Craddick held up a hand and smiled to show he was in on the joke. “Well, this one, boys, was a beauty. Ain’t that right, Seaman Pluff?”

“Aye, sir. She was a looker. Bet she’s a real biscuit too.”

“Little dark for my tastes,” Craddick said. “But she come out the middle of the road, been all roughed up by her spic boyfriend, lucky he didn’t cut her, fond as they are of their knives.”

“You leave her where you found her?”

“Left a sailor with her. Pick him up on the way back if you ever give us a chance to unload these weapons.”

“Fair enough,” Joe said and stepped back.

Craddick may have eased up a notch, but he was still a man on the alert. His eyes soaked up everything. Joe stuck with him, taking one end of a crate while Craddick took the other, lifting by the rope handles built into the ends. As they walked the loading bay corridor to the hold, they could see through the windows to the next corridor over and the offices beyond. Dion had placed all the fair-skinned Cubans in the offices with their backs to the windows, all of them typing gibberish on their Underwoods or crooking receivers to their ears with thumbs pressed down on the cradles. Even so, on their second trip down the corridor it occurred to Joe that every head they saw over there had black hair. Not a blond or a sandy dome in the bunch.

Craddick’s eyes were on the windows as they walked, so far unaware that the corridor between theirs and those offices had just played host to an armed assault and the death of one man.

“Where’d you serve overseas?” Joe asked.

Craddick kept his eyes on the window. “How’d you know I was overseas?”

Bullet holes, Joe thought. Those fucking itchy-fingered Cubans would have left bullet holes behind in the walls. “You have the look of a man seen some action.”

Craddick looked over at Joe. “You recognize men who’ve been in battle?”

“I do today,” Joe said. “With you, anyway.”

“Almost shot that spic woman by the side of the road,” Craddick said mildly.

“Really?”

He nodded. “It was spics tried to blow us up last night. And these boys with me don’t know it yet, but spics called in a threat against the whole crew, said we were all going to die today.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“That’s ’cause it ain’t for hearing yet,” Craddick said. “So I see a spic girl waving us down in the middle of Highway 41? I think, Walter? Shoot that bitch between the tits.”

They reached the hold and stacked the crate on top of the first stack to the left. They stepped aside and Craddick took a handkerchief to his forehead in the hot hallway and they watched the last of the crates come to them as the sailors filed down the corridor.

“Woulda done it too but that she had my daughter’s eyes.”

“Who?”

“The spic girl. Got me a daughter from my time in the DR. Don’t see her or nothing, but her mama sends me pictures every now and then. She got them big dark eyes most Carib’ women have? I see those eyes in this gal today, I holstered my weapon.”

“It was already out?”

“Halfway.” He nodded. “I already had it in my head, you know? Why take chances? Put the bitch down. White men don’t get much more’n a tongue-lashing for that around here. But…” He shrugged. “My daughter’s eyes.”

Joe said nothing, his blood loud in his ears.

“Sent a boy to do it.”

“What?”

He nodded. “One of the boys we got, Cyrus, I believe. Looking for a war but he can’t find one right now. Spic woman saw the look in his eyes, she took off running. Cyrus is part coon hound though, grew up in swampland near the Alabama border. Should find her without breaking him a sweat.”

“Where will you take her?”

“There’s no taking her anywhere. She attacked us, boy. Her people did anyway. Cyrus will do what he will with her, leave the rest for the reptiles.” He put the stub of a cigar in his mouth and struck a match off his boot. He squinted over the flame at Joe. “Confirm your assumption—I seen battle, son, yeah. Killed me one Dominican, killed me Haitians by the bushel, point of fact. Few years later, I took out three Panamanians with one Thompson burst on account they were all bunched together, praying I wouldn’t. The truth of it all and don’t let no one ever tell you different?” He got the cigar going and flicked the match over his shoulder. “It was some fun.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Gangster

As soon as the sailors left, Esteban ran to the motor pool to grab a vehicle. Joe changed out of his uniform as Dion backed the truck over to the ramp and the Cubans began pulling the crates right back out of the hold.

“You got this?” Joe asked Dion.

Dion beamed. “Got it? We own it. You go get her. We’ll see you at the spot in an hour.”

Esteban pulled up in a scout car and Joe hopped in and they took off down Highway 41. Within five minutes they saw the transport truck about a half mile ahead rumbling down a road so straight and flat you could practically see Alabama at the other end.

“If we can see them,” Joe said, “they can see us.”

“Not for long,” Esteban said.

The road appeared to their left. It cut through the palmettos and across the crushed-shell highway and back into the scrub and palmettos on the other side. Esteban turned left, and they bounced onto it. It was gravel and dirt and half the dirt was mud. Esteban drove like Joe felt—harried and reckless.

“What was his name?” Joe said. “The boy who died?”

“Guillermo.”

Joe could see the boy’s eyes as they’d closed, and he didn’t want to find Graciela’s looking the same.

“We shouldn’t have left her out there,” Esteban said.

“I know.”

“We should have assumed they’d have left someone behind with her.”

“I know.”

“We should have had somebody waiting with her, hiding.”

“I fucking know,” Joe said. “How is this helping us now?”

Esteban goosed the gas and they soared over a dip in the road and hit the ground on the other side so hard Joe feared the scout would rise onto its front wheels, flip them onto their fucking heads.

But he didn’t tell Esteban to slow down.

“I’ve known her since we were no taller than the dogs on my family farm.”

Joe didn’t say anything. A swamp lay off to their left through the pines. Cypress and sweet gum trees and plants Joe couldn’t begin to identify raced by on either side of them, blurring until the greens and yellows were the greens and yellows of a painting.

“Her family were migrant farmers. You should see the village she called ‘home’ a few months every year. America has not seen poverty until it’s seen that village. My father realized how bright she was and asked her family if he could hire her as a maid-in-training, yes? What he was really doing was hiring me a friend. I had none, just the horses and the cattle.”

Another bump in the road.

“Strange time to be telling me this,” Joe said.

“I loved her,” Esteban said, speaking loudly over the engine. “Now, I love somebody else, but for many years, I thought I was in love with Graciela.”

He turned to look at Joe and Joe shook his head and pointed. “Eyes on the road, Esteban.”

Another bump, this one lifting them both out of their seats and then back down again.

“She says she’s doing all this for her husband?” Talking helped put the fear in a manageable place, made Joe feel less helpless.

“Ach,” Esteban said. “He’s no husband. He’s no man.”

“I thought he was a revolutionary?”

This time Esteban spat. “He is a thief, a… a… estafador. You call them con men. Yes? He dresses the part of the revolutionary, he recites the poetry, and she fell for him. She lost everything for this man—her family, all her money and she never had much, most of her friends but me.” He shook his head. “She doesn’t even know where he is.”

“I thought he was in jail.”

“He’s been out for two years.”

Another bump. This time they went sideways and the rear quarter panel on Joe’s side slapped a pine sapling before they bounced back into the road.

“But she still pays his family.”

“They lie to her. They tell her he escaped, that he’s hiding in the hills and a gang of los chacales from Nieves Morejón prison are hunting him and Machado’s men are hunting him. They tell her she cannot return to Cuba to see him or they will both be in danger. No one, Joseph, is hunting this man, except for those he owes money. But you cannot tell Graciela that; she does not hear when it comes to him.”

“Why? She’s a smart woman.”

He gave Joe a quick glance and shrugged. “We all believe lies that bring us more comfort than the truth. She’s no different. Her lie is just bigger.”

They missed the turnoff, but Joe caught it out of the corner of his eye and told Esteban to stop. He braked and they slid twenty yards before they finally stopped. He backed up and they turned onto the road.

“How many men have you killed?” Esteban asked.

“None,” Joe said.

“But you’re a gangster.”

Joe didn’t see the point in arguing the distinction between gangster and outlaw because he wasn’t sure there was one anymore. “Not all gangsters kill people.”

“But you must be willing to.”

Joe nodded. “Just like you.”

“I’m a businessman. I provide a product people want. I kill no one.”

“You’re arming Cuban revolutionaries.”

“That’s a cause.”

“In which people will die.”

“There’s a difference,” Esteban said. “I kill for something.”

“What? A fucking ideal?” Joe said.

“Exactly.”

“And what ideal is that, Esteban?”

“That no man should rule another’s life.”

“Funny,” Joe said, “outlaws kill for the same reason.”

She wasn’t there.

They came out of the pine forest and approached Route 41, and there was no sign of Graciela or the sailor who’d been left behind to hunt her. Nothing but the heat and the hum of dragonflies and the white road.

They drove down the road half a mile and then back up to the dirt road and then north another half mile. When they drove back again, Joe heard something he thought was a crow or a hawk.

“Kill the engine, kill the engine.”

Esteban did, and they both stood in the scout car and looked out at the road and the pines and the cypress swamp beyond and the hard white sky that matched the road.

Nothing. Nothing but the dragonfly buzz Joe now suspected never stopped—morning, noon, or night, like living with your ear to a train track just after the train had passed over it.

Esteban sat back down and Joe went to but stopped.

He thought he saw something just to the east, back the way they’d come, something that—

“There.” He pointed, and as he did she ran out from behind a stand of pines. She didn’t run in their direction and Joe realized she was too smart for that. If she had, she would have been running full out for fifty yards through low palmettos and pine saplings.

Esteban gunned the engine and they dropped down the shoulder and through a ditch and then back out again, Joe holding on to the top of the windshield and hearing the shots now—hard cracks strangely muted even out here with nothing around them. From his vantage point, he still couldn’t see the shooter, but he could see the swamp and he knew she was headed for it. He nudged Esteban with his foot and waved his arm to the left, a little farther southwest than the line they were on.

Esteban turned the wheel and Joe got a sudden glimpse of dark blue, just a flash of it, and saw the man’s head and heard his rifle. Up ahead, Graciela fell to her knees in the swamp and Joe couldn’t tell whether she’d fallen because she’d tripped or because she’d been shot. They ran out of firm land, the shooter just off to their right. Esteban slowed as he entered the swamp and Joe jumped out of the scout.

It was like jumping out onto the moon if the moon was green. The bald cypress rose like great eggs from the milky green water, and prehistoric banyan trees with a dozen or more trunks stood watch like palace guards. Esteban drove to his right just as Joe saw Graciela dart between two of the bald cypress trees to his left. Something uncomfortably heavy crawled over his feet just as he heard a rifle report, the shot much closer now. The bullet tore a chunk from the cypress tree where Graciela was hiding.

The young seaman stepped out from behind a cypress ten feet away. He was about Joe’s height and build, his hair quite red, his face very lean. His Springfield was raised to his shoulder, the sight raised to his eye, the barrel pointed at the cypress. Joe extended his .32 automatic and exhaled a long breath as he shot the man from ten feet. The rifle jerked and spun in the air so erratically Joe assumed it was all he’d hit. But as it fell to the tea-colored water, the young man fell with it, and the blood spilled from under his left armpit and darkened the water as he landed with a splash.

“Graciela,” he called, “it’s Joe. Are you okay?”

She peeked out from behind the tree and Joe nodded. Esteban came around behind her in the scout car and she climbed in it and they drove over to Joe.

He picked up the rifle and looked down at the sailor. He sat in the water with his arms draped over his knees and his head down, like a man trying to catch his breath.

Graciela climbed out of the scout. Actually, she half fell out, half reeled into Joe. He put his arm around her to right her and felt the adrenaline racking her body as if she’d been hit with a cattle prod.

Behind the sailor, something moved through the mangroves. Something long and so dark green it was almost black.

The sailor looked up at Joe, his mouth open as he drew shallow breaths. “You’re white.”

“Yeah,” Joe said.

“Fuck you shoot me for then?”

Joe looked at Esteban and then at Graciela. “If we leave him here, something’s gonna eat him within a couple minutes. So we either take him with us or…”

He could hear more of them out there as the sailor’s blood continued to spill into the green swamp.

Joe said, “So we either take him with us…”

Esteban said, “He’s gotten too good a look at her.”

“I know it,” Joe said.

Graciela said, “He turned it into a game.”

“What?”

“Hunting me. He kept laughing like a girl.”

Joe looked at the sailor and the kid looked back at him. The fear lived far back in the young man’s eyes, but the rest of him was pure defiance and backwoods grit.

“You want me to beg, you barking up the wrong—”

Joe shot him in the face and the exit hole splattered pink all over the ferns, and the alligators thrashed in anticipation.

Graciela let out a small involuntary cry and Joe might have as well. Esteban caught his eye and nodded, thanks, Joe realized, for doing what they all knew had to be done but which none had been willing to do. Hell, Joe—standing in the sound of the gunshot, the cordite smell of it, a wisp of smoke trailing from the barrel of the .32 no more substantial than the smoke from one of his cigarettes—couldn’t believe he’d actually done it.

A man lay dead at his feet. Dead, on some fundamental level, only because Joe had been born.

They climbed into the scout without another word. As if they’d been waiting for permission, two alligators came at the body at once—one walking out of the mangroves with the steady waddle of an overweight dog and the other gliding up through the water and the lily pads beside the scout’s tires.

Esteban drove away as both reptiles reached the body at the same time. One took an arm, the other went for a leg.

Back in the pines, Esteban drove southeast along the edge of the swamp, running parallel to the road, but not turning toward it yet.

Joe and Graciela sat in the backseat. Alligators and humans weren’t the only predators in the swamp that day: a panther stood at the edge of the waterline, lapping up the copper water. It was the same tan color as some of the trees, and Joe might have missed it altogether if it didn’t look up as they passed from twenty yards away. It was at least five feet long, wet limbs all grace and muscle. Its underbelly and throat were creamy white, and steam rose off its wet fur as it considered the car. Actually, it wasn’t considering the car, it was considering him. Joe met its liquid eyes, as ancient, yellow, and pitiless as the sun. For a moment, in his jagged exhaustion he thought he heard its voice in his head.

You can’t outrun this.

What’s this? he wanted to ask, but Esteban turned the wheel and they left the edge of the swamp and bounced violently over the roots of a fallen tree, and when Joe looked again the panther was gone. He scanned the trees to catch another glimpse but he never saw it again.

“You see that cat?”

Graciela stared at him.

“The panther,” he said, holding his arms wide.

Her eyes narrowed like she worried he might have sunstroke. She shook her head. She was a mess—more scratches on her body than skin it seemed. Her face was swollen from where he’d hit her, of course, and the mosquitoes and deerflies had feasted on her—and not just them but the fire ants as well, leaving behind their white welts with red rings all over her feet and calves. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and over her left hip and the hem was shredded. Her shoes were gone.

“You can put it away,” she said.

Joe followed her gaze, saw that he still held the gun in his right hand. He thumbed the safety on and placed it in the holster behind his back.

Esteban pulled out onto 41 and stomped the gas so hard the scout shuddered in place before streaking down the road. Joe looked out at the crushed-shell pavement racing away from them, at the merciless sun in the merciless sky.

“He would have killed me.” Her wet hair blew across her face and neck.

“I know.”

“He hunted me like a squirrel for his lunch. He kept saying, ‘Honey, honey, I will put one in your leg, honey, and then have at you.’ Does ‘have at you’ mean…?”

Joe nodded.

“And if you’d let him live,” she said, “I would have been arrested. And then you would have been arrested.”

He nodded. He considered the insect bites on her ankles and then raised his eyes up her calves, across her dress, and into her eyes. She held his gaze just long enough to slide hers off his face. She looked out at an orange grove as they raced past it. After a while, she looked back at him.

“Do you think I feel bad?” he asked.

“I can’t tell.”

“I don’t,” he said.

“You shouldn’t.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“You shouldn’t feel that, either.”

“But I don’t feel bad.”

That pretty much summed it up.

I’m not an outlaw anymore, he thought. I’m a gangster. And this is my gang.

In the back of the scout car with the sharp smell of citrus giving way, once again, to the stench of swamp gas, she held his gaze for a full mile, and neither of them said another word until they reached West Tampa.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN About Today

When they got back to Ybor, Esteban dropped Graciela and Joe at the building where Graciela kept a room above a café. Joe walked her up while Esteban and Sal Urso went to dump the scout car in South Tampa.

Graciela’s room was very small and very neat. The wrought iron bed was painted the same white as the porcelain washbasin under a matching oval mirror. Her clothes hung in a battered pine wardrobe that looked to predate the building, but she kept it clear of dust or mold, which Joe would have guessed impossible in this climate. The one window overlooked Eleventh Avenue, and she’d left the shade down to keep the room cool. She had a dressing screen made of the same raised-grain wood as the wardrobe, and she pointed Joe to face the window as she went behind it.

“So you are a king now,” she said as he raised the shade and looked out at the avenue.

“I’m sorry?”

“You have cornered the rum market. You will be a king.”

“A prince, maybe,” he admitted. “Still gotta deal with Albert White.”

“Why do I think you’ve already figured out how to do that?”

He lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the windowsill. “Plans are just dreams until they’re executed.”

“Is this what you always wanted?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, then, congratulations.”

He looked back at her. The filthy evening gown hung over the screen and her shoulders were bare. “You don’t sound like you mean it.”

She pointed for him to turn back around. “I do. It’s what you wanted. You achieved it. That’s admirable in some way.”

He chuckled. “In some way.”

“But how will you hold the power now that you have it? That’s an interesting question, I think.”

“You think I’m not strong enough?” He looked back at her again and she allowed him to because she’d covered her upper body with a white blouse.

“I don’t know if you’re cruel enough.” Her dark eyes were very clear. “And if you are, then that will be sad.”

“Powerful men don’t have to be cruel.”

“But they usually are.” Her head ducked below the screen as she stepped into her skirt. “Now that you’ve seen me dress and I’ve seen you shoot a man, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Who is she?”

“Who?”

Her head appeared above the screen again. “The one you love.”

“Who says I’m in love with anyone?”

“I say so.” She shrugged. “A woman knows these things. Is she in Florida?”

He smiled, shook his head. “She’s gone.”

“She left you?”

“She died.”

She blinked and then stared at him to see if he was putting her on. When she realized he wasn’t, she said, “I’m sorry.”

He changed the subject. “Are you happy about the guns?”

She leaned her arms on the top of the screen. “Very. When the day comes to end Machado’s rule—and that day will come—we will have a…” She snapped her fingers, looked at him. “Help me.”

“An arsenal,” he said.

“Arsenal, yes.”

“So these aren’t the only weapons.”

She shook her head. “Not the first and they will not be the last. When the time comes, we will be ready.” She came out from behind the screen in the standard clothes of a female cigar worker—white blouse with string tie over tan skirt. “You think what I’m doing is foolish.”

“Not at all. I think it’s noble. It’s just not my cause.”

“What is?”

“Rum.”

“You do not want to be a noble person?” She held her thumb and index finger close together. “A little bit?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got nothing against noble people, I’ve just noticed they rarely live past forty.”

“Neither do gangsters.”

“True,” he said, “but we eat in better restaurants.”

From the wardrobe, she selected a pair of flats the same color as her shirt, sat on the bed to put them on.

He stayed at the window. “Let’s say someday you have this revolution.”

“Yes.”

“Will anything change?”

“People can change.” She put one shoe on.

He shook his head. “The world can change, but people, no, people stay pretty much the same. So even if you replace Machado, there’s a good chance you’ll replace him with a worse version. Meanwhile, you could be maimed or you could—”

“I could die.” She twisted her torso to put on the other shoe. “I know how this probably ends, Joseph.”

“Joe.”

“Joseph,” she said. “I could die because a comrade betrays me for money. I could get captured by damaged men, as damaged as the one today or even worse, and they will torture me until my body can no longer endure it. And there won’t be anything noble in my death because death is never noble. You weep and beg and the shit flows out of your ass as you die. And those who kill you laugh and spit on your corpse. And I will be quickly forgotten. As if”—she snapped her fingers—“I was never here. I know all that.”

“So why do it?”

She stood and smoothed the skirt. “I love my country.”

“I love mine but—”

“There is no but,” she said. “That’s the difference between us. Your country is something you see out that window. Yes?”

He nodded. “Pretty much.”

“My country is something in here.” She tapped the center of her chest and then her temple. “And I know she won’t thank me for my efforts. She’s not going to return my love. That would be impossible, because I don’t just love the people and the buildings and the smell of her. I love the idea of her. And that’s something I made up, so I love what isn’t there. Like you love that dead girl.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that so he just watched her cross the room and pull the dress she’d worn in the swamp off the screen. She handed it to him as they left the room.

“Burn that, will you?”

The guns were bound for the Pinar del Río province, west of Havana. They left St. Petersburg on five grouper boats out of Boca Ciega Bay at three in the afternoon. Dion, Joe, Esteban, and Graciela saw them off. Joe had changed from the suit he’d ruined in the swamp to the lightest one he owned. Graciela had watched as he’d burned it along with her dress, but she was fading now from her time as prey in a cypress swamp. She kept nodding off on the bench that sat under the dock lamp yet refused all offers to sit in one of the cars or let someone drive her back to Ybor.

When the last of the grouper captains had shaken their hands and shoved off, they stood looking at one another. Joe realized they had no idea what to do next. How could you top the last two days? The sky had grown red. Somewhere down the jagged shoreline, past a clump of mangroves, a canvas sail or tarp fluttered in the hot breeze. Joe looked at Esteban. He looked at Graciela, who leaned against the lamppost with her eyes closed. He looked at Dion. A pelican swooped over his head, its bill bigger than its belly. Joe looked at the boats, way out there now, the size of dunce caps from this distance, and he started laughing. He couldn’t help himself. Dion and Esteban were right behind him, all three of them roaring in no time. Graciela covered her face for a moment and then she started laughing too, laughing and crying actually, Joe noticed, peeking out from between her fingers like a small girl until she dropped her hands entirely. She laughed and cried and ran both hands through her hair repeatedly and then wiped her face with the collar of her blouse. They walked to the edge of the dock and the laughs became chuckles and then echoes of chuckles and they looked out at the water as it grew purple under the red sky. The boats found the horizon and slipped past it, one by one.

Joe didn’t remember much about the rest of that day. They went to one of Maso’s speaks behind a veterinarian on the corner of Fifteenth and Nebraska. Esteban arranged to have a case of dark rum aged in cherry casks sent over, and word got around to everyone involved in the heist. Soon Pescatore gunsels mingled with Esteban’s revolutionaries. Then the women arrived in their silk dresses and sequined hats. A band took the stage. In no time, the joint was hopping enough to crack the masonry.

Dion danced with three women simultaneously, swinging them behind his broad back and under his stubby legs with surprising dexterity. When it came to dance, however, Esteban proved to be the artist of the group. He moved on his feet as lightly as a cat on a high branch, but with a command so total that the band soon began to fashion songs to his tempo, not the other way around. He reminded Joe of Valentino in that flicker where he played a bullfighter—it was that degree of masculine grace. Soon half the women in the speak were trying to match his steps or land him for the night.

“I never saw a guy move like that,” Joe said to Graciela.

She was sitting in the corner of a booth, while he sat on the floor in front of it. She leaned over to speak in his ear. “It’s what he did when he first came here.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was his job,” she said. “He was a taxi dancer downtown.”

“You’re putting me on.” He tilted his head, looked up at her. “What doesn’t this guy do well?”

She said, “He was a professional dancer in Havana. Very good. Never the lead in any productions but always in high demand. It’s how he supported himself during law school.”

Joe almost spit up his drink. “He’s a lawyer?”

“In Havana, yes.”

“He told me he grew up on a farm.”

“He did. My family worked for his. We were, uh—” She looked at him.

“Migrant farmers?”

“Is that the word?” She scrunched her face at him, at least as drunk as he was. “No, no, we were tenant farmers.”

“Your father rented land from his father and paid his rent in crops?”

“No.”

“That’s tenant farming. It’s what my grandfather did in Ireland.” He tried to appear sober, learned, but it was work under the circumstances. “Migrant farming is when you go from farm to farm with the seasons, depending on the crop.”

“Ah,” she said, unhappy with the clarification. “So smart, Joseph. You know everything.”

“You asked, chica.”

“Did you just call me ‘chica’?”

“I believe I did.”

“Your accent is horrible.”

“So’s your Gaelic.”

“What?”

He waved it off. “I’m a work in progress.”

“His father was a great man.” Her eyes shone. “He took me into the home, gave me my own bedroom with clean sheets. I learned English from a private tutor. Me, a village girl.”

“And his father asked for what in return?”

She read his eyes. “You’re disgusting.”

“It’s a fair question.”

“He asked nothing. Maybe his head, it swelled a bit for all he did for this little village girl, but that was all.”

He held up a hand. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You see the worst in the best of people,” she said, shaking her head, “and the best in the worst of people.”

He couldn’t think of a reply to that, so he shrugged and let the silence and the liquor return the mood to a softer place.

“Come.” She slid out of the booth. “Dance.” She pulled at his hands.

“I don’t dance.”

“Tonight,” she said, “everyone dances.”

He allowed her to pull him to his feet even though it was a fucking abomination to share the same dance floor as Esteban or, to a lesser extent, Dion, and call what he did the same thing.

Sure enough, Dion laughed openly at him, but he was too drunk to care. He let Graciela lead and he followed and soon he found a beat he could keep a kind of pace with. They stayed out on the floor for quite some time, passing a bottle of Suarez dark rum back and forth. At one point he found himself lost in cross-images of her; in one she ran through the cypress swamp like desperate prey and in the other she danced a few feet away from him, hips twitching, shoulders and head swaying as she tipped the bottle to her lips.

He’d killed for this woman. Killed for himself too. But if there was one question he hadn’t been able to answer all day, it was why he’d shot the sailor in the face. You didn’t do that to a man unless you were angry. You shot him in the chest. But Joe had blown his face up. That was personal. And that, he realized as he lost himself in the sway of her, was because he’d seen clearly in the sailor’s eyes that the man held Graciela in contempt. Because she was brown, raping her wasn’t a sin; it was just indulging in the spoils of war. Whether she’d been alive or dead when he did it would have made little difference to Cyrus.

Graciela raised her arms above her head, the bottle up there with her, her wrists crossing, forearms snaking around each other, crooked smile on her bruised face, eyes at half-mast.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“About today.”

“What about today?” she asked but then saw it in his eyes. She lowered her arms and handed him the bottle and they moved out of the center and stood by the table again and drank the rum.

“I don’t care about him,” Joe said. “I guess I just wish there had been another way.”

“There wasn’t.”

He nodded. “Which is why I don’t regret what I did. I just regret that it happened.”

She took the bottle from him. “How do you thank the man who saved your life after he dangered it?”

“Dangered it?”

She wiped at her mouth with her knuckles. “Yes. How?”

He cocked his head at her.

She read his eyes and laughed. “Some other way, chico.”

“You just say thanks.” He took the bottle from her and had a sip.

“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.”

The 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.

It 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.”

“How many more we got on the street?” Joe asked.

“Four cars full,” Dion said.

Joe stood. “Albert, I don’t want to kill anybody in this café but that doesn’t mean I won’t if you give me half a reason.”

Albert smiled, smug as always, even outnumbered and outgunned. “We won’t give you a quarter of a reason. How’s that for cooperation?”

Joe spit in his face.

Albert’s eyes went as small as peppercorns.

For a very long moment, no one in the café moved.

“I’m going to reach for my handkerchief,” Albert said.

“You reach for anything, we plug you where you stand,” Joe said. “Use your fucking sleeve.”

As he did, Albert’s smile returned but his eyes remained filled with murder. “So you’re either killing me or running me out of town.”

“That’s right.”

“Which?”

Joe looked at the café owner and her rosary, at Graciela standing beside her, her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

“Don’t think I feel like killing you today, Albert. You don’t have the guns or the funds to start a war, and you’d need years of building new alliances to make me look over my shoulder.”

Albert took a seat. Just as easy as you please. Like he was visiting old friends. Joe remained standing.

“You planned this since the alley,” he said.

“Sure did.”

“At least tell me some of this was just business,” he said.

Joe shook his head. “This was completely personal.”

Albert took that in and nodded. “You want to ask about her?”

Joe felt Graciela’s eyes on him. And Dion’s.

He said, “Not particularly, no. You fucked her, I loved her, and then you killed her. What’s left to discuss?”

Albert shrugged. “I did love her. More than you could imagine.”

“I got a hell of an imagination.”

“Not this good,” he said.

Joe tried to read the face behind Albert’s face, and he got the same feeling he’d gotten in the basement service corridor of the Hotel Statler—that Albert’s feelings for Emma matched his own.

“So why’d you kill her?”

“I didn’t kill her,” Albert said. “You did. The moment you put your dick in her. Thousands of other girls in that city and you a pretty boy to boot, but you take mine. You give a man horns, he has two choices—gore himself or gore you.”

“But you didn’t gore me. You gored her.”

Albert shrugged and Joe could see clearly that it pained him still. Christ, he thought, she owns a piece of both of us.

Albert looked around the café. “Your master ran me out of Boston. Now you’re running me out of Tampa. That the play?”

“Pretty much.”

Albert pointed at Dion. “You know he sold you out in Pittsfield? That he’s the reason you did two years in jail?”

“Yeah, I do. Hey, D.”

Dion never took his eyes off Bones and Loomis. “Yeah?”

“Put a couple bullets in Albert’s brain.”

Albert’s eyes popped wide and the café owner let out a yelp and Dion crossed the floor with his arm extended. Sal and Lefty revealed Thompsons under their raincoats to cover Loomis and Bones, and Dion put the gun to Albert’s temple. Albert scrunched his eyes closed and held up his hands.

Joe said, “Hold it.”

Dion stopped.

Joe fixed his trousers and squatted in front of Albert. “Look in my friend’s eyes.”

Albert looked up at Dion.

“You see any love for you in them, Albert?”

“No.” Albert blinked. “No, I don’t.”

Joe nodded at Dion, and Dion removed the gun from Albert’s head.

“You drive here?”

“What?”

“Did you drive here?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’re gonna go to your car and drive north out of the state. I suggest Georgia because as of now I control Alabama, the Mississippi coast, and every town between here and New Orleans.” He smiled at Albert. “And I’ve got a meeting about New Orleans next week.”

“How do I know you won’t have men waiting on the road for me?”

“Hell, Albert, I will have men on the road. In fact, they’re going to follow you out of the state. Ain’t that right, Sal?”

“Car’s all gassed up, Mr. Coughlin.”

Albert got a look at Sal’s tommy gun. “How do I know they won’t kill us on the road?”

“You don’t,” Joe said. “But if you don’t leave Tampa right now and leave for good, I’ll give you the A & P fucking guarantee you won’t see tomorrow. And I know you want to see tomorrow because that’s when you’ll start planning your revenge.”

“Then why leave me alive?”

“So everyone knows I took everything you had, and you weren’t man enough to stop me.” Joe straightened from his crouch. “I’m letting you keep your life, Albert, because I can’t think of a soul who would fucking want it.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Nobody’s Son

During the good years, Dion said to Joe, “Luck ends.”

He said it more than once.

Joe would reply, “Good luck and bad.”

“It’s just your luck has been good so long,” Dion said, “no one remembers your bad.”

He built a house for himself and Graciela on the corner of Ninth and Nineteenth. He used Spanish labor, Cuban labor, Italians for the marble work, and brought in architects from New Orleans to ensure that a multitude of styles coalesced into a Latin Vieux Carré. He and Graciela made several trips to New Orleans to tour the French Quarter for inspiration and took long walking trips around Ybor as well. They came up with a design that married Greek Revival with Spanish Colonial. The house sported a facade of redbrick and pale concrete balconies with wrought iron rails. The windows were green and kept shuttered so the house looked almost plain from the street, and it was difficult to tell when it was occupied.

But in the back, wide rooms with high copper ceilings and tall archways looked onto a courtyard, a wading pool, and gardens where spotted horsemint, violets, and tickseeds grew alongside European fan palms. The stucco walls were covered in Algerian ivy. In the winter the bougainvillea flowered alongside a riot of yellow Carolina jessamine, both fading in the spring to be replaced by trumpet creepers as dark as blood oranges. The stone paths snaked around a fountain in the courtyard, then passed through the loggia archways to a staircase that curled up into the house past walls of eggshell brick.

All the doors in the home were at least six inches thick and sported ram’s horn hinges and door latches of black iron. Joe had helped design the third-floor salon with the domed ceiling and an azotea overlooking the alley that ran behind the house. It was a frivolous porch, given the second-story balcony that wrapped around the rest of the house and the cast-iron third-story gallery with a veranda as wide as the street, and he often forgot it was there.

Once Joe got started, though, he couldn’t stop himself. Guests lucky enough to be invited to one of Graciela’s charity fund-raisers couldn’t help noticing the salon or the grand center hall with the double-wide staircase or the imported silk draperies, Italian bishop’s chairs, Napoléon III cheval mirror with attached candelabras, marble mantels from Florence, or gilt-framed paintings from a gallery in Paris Esteban had recommended. Exposed Augusta Block brick walls met walls covered in satin paper or stenciled patterns or fashionably cracked stucco. Parquet floors at the front of the house yielded to stone floors at the back to keep the rooms cool. In the summer, the furniture was slip-covered in white cotton, and gauze dripped from chandeliers to keep them safe from insects. Mosquito netting hung from Joe and Graciela’s bed and over the claw-foot tub in the bathroom where they often gathered at the end of a day with a bottle of wine, the sounds of the streets rising to them.

Graciela lost friends over the opulence. These were mostly her friends from the factory and those who’d volunteered with her during the early days of the Circulo Cubano. It wasn’t that they begrudged Graciela her newfound wealth and good fortune (though a few did), it was more that they feared they’d bump into something valuable and knock it to the stone floors. They couldn’t sit without fidgeting, and soon they ran out of things they had in common with Graciela and so had nothing left to discuss.

In Ybor, they called the house El Alcalde de la Mansión—The Mayor’s Mansion—but Joe wouldn’t learn of the nickname for at least a year because the voices in the street never rose high enough for him to hear them distinctly.

Meanwhile, the Coughlin-Suarez partnership created enviable stability in a business not known for it. Joe and Esteban established a distillery in the Landmark Theater on Seventh and then another behind the kitchen of the Romero Hotel, and they kept them clean and in constant production. They brought all the mom-and-pop operations into the fold, even the ones who’d worked for Albert White, by giving them a healthier cut and a better product. They bought faster boats and replaced all the engines in their trucks and transport cars. They bought a two-seater seaplane to fly cover for the Gulf runs. The seaplane was piloted by Farruco Diaz, a former Mexican revolutionary as talented as he was insane. Farruco, a notable mess of ancient pockmarks as deep as fingertips and long hair as pale and stringy as wet pasta, lobbied to install a machine gun in the passenger seat “just in case.” When Joe pointed out to him that since he flew solo, there would be nobody to man the gun on those times that “just in case” occurred, Farruco agreed to a compromise, by which they allowed him to install the mount but not the gun.

On the ground, they bought into routes all over the South and along the Eastern Seaboard, Joe’s logic being that if they paid the various Dixie gangs tribute to use their roads, the gangs would pay off the local laws, and the number of arrests and lost loads would drop by 30 to 35 percent.

They dropped by seventy.

In no time at all, Joe and Esteban had turned a one-million-dollars-a-year operation into a six-million-dollars-a-year juggernaut.

And this during a global financial crisis that kept worsening, each shock wave followed by a bigger one, day after day, month after month. People needed jobs and they needed shelter and they needed hope. When none of those proved forthcoming, they settled for a drink.

Vice, he realized, was Depression-proof.

Just about nothing else was, though. Even insulated from it, Joe was still as bewildered as everyone else by the elevator drop the country had taken in the last few years. Since the ’29 crash, ten thousand banks had gone belly-up and thirteen million people had lost their jobs. Hoover, facing a reelection fight, kept talking about a light at the end of the tunnel, but most people decided that light came from the train barreling up to run them over. So Hoover made a last-ditch scramble to raise the tax rate for the richest of the rich from 25 to 63 percent and lost the only people left who supported him.

In Greater Tampa, oddly, the economy surged—shipbuilding and canneries thrived. But no one got the word in Ybor. The cigar factories started sinking faster than the banks. Rolling machines replaced people; radios supplanted the readers on the floor. Cigarettes, so cheap, became the nation’s new legal vice, and sales of cigars plummeted by more than 50 percent. The workers of a dozen factories went out on strike, only to see their efforts crushed by management goons, police, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Italians left Ybor in droves. The Spaniards started to move out too.

Graciela lost her job to a machine. This was fine with Joe—he’d been wanting to get her out of La Trocha for months. She was too valuable to his organization. She met the Cubans who came off the boats and brought them to the social club or the hospitals or the Cuban hotels, depending on what they needed. If she saw one she believed was suited for Joe’s line of work, she spoke to him of an even more unique job opportunity.

In addition, it was her instinct for philanthropy, coupled with Joe and Esteban’s need to clean their money, that led to Joe’s buying up roughly 5 percent of Ybor City. He bought two failed cigar factories and reemployed all the workers, turned a failed department store into a school and a bankrupt plumbing supplier into a free clinic. He turned eight empty buildings into speakeasies, though from the street they all looked like their fronts: a haberdasher, a tobacconist, two florists, three butchers, and a Greek lunch counter that much to everyone’s shock—none more so than Joe’s own—became so successful they had to import the rest of the cook’s family from Athens and open a sister lunch counter seven blocks east.

Graciela missed the factory, though. Missed the jokes and tales the other rollers would tell, missed hearing the readers narrate her favorite novels in Spanish, missed speaking in her mother tongue all day.

Even though she spent every night at the house Joe had built for them, she kept her room above the café, although as far as Joe knew, all she ever did there was change her clothes. And not very often, either. Joe had filled a closet in his home with clothes he’d bought her.

“Clothes you bought me,” she’d say when he’d ask her why she didn’t wear them more often. “I like to buy my own things.”

Which she never had the money for because she sent all her money back to Cuba, either to the family of her deadbeat husband or to friends in the anti-Machado movement. Esteban made trips back to Cuba on her behalf sometimes too, fund-raising trips that coincided with the opening of this nightclub or that. He’d come back with news of fresh hope in the movement that, experience had taught Joe, would be dashed on his next trip. He’d also come back with his photographs—his eye getting sharper and sharper, wielding that camera like a great violinist wielded his bow. He’d become a name in the insurgency circles of Latin America, a reputation built, in no small part, on the sabotage of the USS Mercy.

“You’ve got a very confused woman on your hands,” he told Joe after his last trip over.

“This I know,” Joe said.

“Do you understand why she is confused?”

Joe poured them each a glass of Suarez Reserve. “No, I don’t. We can buy or do anything we want. She can have the finest clothes, get her hair done at the nicest shops, go to the nicest restaurants—”

“That allow Latins.”

“That goes without saying.”

“Does it?” Esteban leaned forward in his chair, put his feet on the floor.

“The point I’m trying to make,” Joe said, “is that we won. We can relax, she and I. Grow old together.”

“And you think that’s what she wants—to be a rich man’s wife?”

“Isn’t that what most women want?”

Esteban gave that a strange smile. “You told me once you did not grow up poor like most gangsters.”

Joe nodded. “We weren’t rich but…”

“But you had a nice house, food in your bellies, could afford to go to school.”

“Yes.”

“And was your mother happy?”

Joe said nothing for a long time.

“I’ll assume that’s a no,” Esteban said.

Eventually Joe said, “My parents seemed more like distant cousins. Graciela and me? We’re not those people. We talk all the time. We”—he lowered his voice—“fuck all the time. We truly enjoy each other’s company.”

“So?”

“So why won’t she love me?”

Esteban laughed. “Of course she loves you.”

“She won’t say it.”

“Who cares if she says it?”

“I do,” Joe said. “And she won’t divorce Shithead.”

“I can’t speak to that,” Esteban said. “I could live a thousand years and never understand the hold that pendejo has over her.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Every time I walk down the worst block in Old Havana he sits there in one of the bars, drinking her money.”

My money, Joe thought. Mine.

“Is anyone still looking for her over there?”

“Her name’s on a list,” Esteban said.

Joe thought about it. “But I could get her false papers in a fortnight. Couldn’t I?”

Esteban nodded. “Of course. Maybe sooner.”

“So I could send her back there, she could see this asshole sitting on his barstool, and she’d… She’d what, Esteban? You think it would be enough for her to leave him?”

He shrugged. “Joseph, listen to me. She loves you. I have known her all my life and I have seen her in love before. But you? Whoosh.” He widened his eyes, fanned his face with his hat. “It’s something different than she’s ever felt. But you must remember, she’s spent the last ten years defining herself as a revolutionary, and now she wakes up to discover that what she really wants is to throw all that off her shoulders—her beliefs, her country, her calling, and, yes, her stupid old husband—to be with an American gangster. You think she’s just going to admit that to herself?”

“Why not?”

“Because then she has to admit she’s a café rebel, a fake. She’s not going to admit that. She’s going to redouble her commitment to the cause and hold you at arm’s length.” He shook his head and grew thoughtful, staring up at the ceiling. “When you say it out loud, it’s quite mad actually.”

Joe rubbed his face. “You got that right.”

Everything hummed along smoothly for a couple years—a hell of a run in their business—until Robert Drew Pruitt came to town.

The Monday after Joe’s talk with Esteban, Dion came in to tell him that RD had stuck up another of their clubs. Robert Drew Pruitt was called RD, and he’d been a concern to everyone in Ybor since he’d gotten out of prison eight weeks ago and showed up here to make his way in the world.

“Why can’t we just find this asshole and put him down?”

“The Klavern ain’t going to like that.”

The KKK had gained a lot of power in Tampa recently. They’d always been fanatic drys, not because they didn’t drink themselves—they did, and constantly—but because they believed alcohol gave delusions of power to the mud people and led to fornication between the races and was also part of a papist plot to sow weakness in the practitioners of true religion so Catholics could eventually take over the world.

The Klan had left Ybor alone until the crash. Once the economy went in the tank, their message of white power began to find desperate believers, the same way the fire-and-brimstone preachers had seen attendance in their tents swell. People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn’t reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.

They found it in the cigar workers, who had a long history of labor battles and radical thought. The Klan ended the last strike. Every time the strikers gathered, the KKK would bust into the meetings firing rifles and pistol-whipping whoever was in reach. They burned a cross on one striker’s lawn, firebombed the house of another on Seventeenth, and raped two female cigar workers walking home from the Celestino Vega factory.

The strike was called off.

RD Pruitt had been Klan before he left to do a two-year bid at the State Prison Farm at Raiford, so there was little reason to believe he hadn’t joined right back up when he got out. The first speak he stuck up, a hole-in-the-wall in the back of a bodega on Twenty-seventh, was directly across the train tracks from an old shotgun shack rumored to be the headquarters for the local Klavern run by Kelvin Beauregard. As RD was helping himself to the night’s till, he gestured at the wall closest to the tracks and said, “We all be watching so we best not see no laws.”

When Joe heard that, he knew he was dealing with a moron—who the fuck would call the police when a speakeasy was robbed? But the “we” gave him pause because the Klan were just waiting for someone like Joe to stick his head up. A Catholic Yankee who worked with the Latins, Italians, and Negroes, shacked up with a Cuban, and made his money selling the demon rum—what wasn’t there to hate about him?

In fact, he realized pretty quickly, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were calling him out. The foot soldiers of the Klan might have been a collection of inbred idiots with fourth-grade educations at third-rate schools, but their leaders tended to be a bit smarter. Besides Kelvin Beauregard, a local cannery owner and city councilman, the group was rumored to include Judge Franklin of the 13th Judicial Court, a dozen cops, and even Hopper Hewitt, publisher of the Tampa Examiner.

The other, far more meaningful complication, in Joe’s view, was that RD’s brother-in-law was Irving Figgis, also known as Eagle Eye Irv, but more formally as Tampa’s chief of police.

Since their first meeting back in ’29, Chief Figgis had brought Joe in for questioning a few times, just to keep clear the adversarial nature of their relationship. Joe would sit in his office and sometimes Irv would have his secretary bring them lemonade, and Joe would look at the pictures on his desk—the beautiful wife, and the two apple-haired children, the boy, Caleb, a dead ringer for his daddy, and the girl, Loretta, still so beautiful it muddied Joe’s brain whenever he looked at her. She’d been homecoming queen at Hillsborough High School and had been winning all sorts of awards in local theater since she was a pup. So no one was surprised when she headed west for Hollywood upon graduation. Like everyone else, Joe expected to see her up on the big screen any day now. She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths.

Surrounded by the images of his perfect life, Irv had warned Joe on more than one occasion that if his department ever found anything to tie him to the Mercy job, they’d damn well rope Joe up for the rest of his life. And who knew what the Feds would do from there—maybe tie that rope around his neck, drop him through the gallows. But otherwise, Irv let Joe and Esteban and their people be, as long as they all stayed the hell out of white Tampa.

But now here came RD Pruitt sticking up the fourth Pescatore speakeasy in a single month and fairly begging Joe to retaliate.

“All four bartenders have said the same thing about this kid,” Dion told Joe, “said he’s sick-mean. You can see it in him. He’s gonna kill somebody next time or the time after.”

Joe had known plenty of guys in prison who fit that description and they normally left you with only three choices—get them to work for you, get them to ignore you, or kill them. There was no way Joe wanted RD to work for him and no way RD would take orders from a Catholic or a Cuban, so that left options two and three.

One morning in February, he met with Chief Figgis at the Tropicale, the day warm and dry, Joe having learned by now that from late October to the end of April, the climate here was hard to beat. They sipped their coffees with a boost of Suarez Reserve added to it, and Chief Figgis looked out onto Seventh with an itch in his stare and fidgeted in his chair.

Lately there was something tucked just behind the corner of him that was trying not to drown. Some second heart beating in his ears, beating in his throat, beating behind his eyes enough to make them bulge sometimes.

Joe didn’t have a clue what had gone wrong in the man’s life—maybe his wife had run off, maybe someone he loved had died—but it was clear something ate at him lately, took the vigor from him, took the certainty too.

He said, “You hear the Perez factory is closing?”

“Shit,” Joe said. “That’s got, what, four hundred workers?”

“Five hundred. Five hundred more people without jobs, five hundred pairs of idle hands waiting to do the devil’s handiwork. But, shit, even the devil ain’t hiring these days. So they ain’t going to get up to much of anything but drinking and fighting and robbing and making my job all the harder, but at least I got one.”

Joe said, “I heard Jeb Paul’s closing his dry goods store.”

“Heard that too. Been in his family since before this city had a name.”

“A shame.”

“Damn shame, what it is.”

They drank, and RD Pruitt sauntered in off the street. Wore himself a tan knicker suit with wide lapels, a white golf cap, and two-toned Oxfords like he was heading out to the back nine. Rolled a toothpick across his lower lip.

Soon as he sat down, Joe saw it in his face clear as a stream—fear. It lived back behind his eyes, leaked out of his pores. Most people didn’t see it because they mistook its public faces—hatred and ill temper—for rage. But Joe had studied it for two years in Charlestown, and he’d discovered that the worst of the men in there were also the most terrified—terrified of being found out as cowards or, worse, victims, themselves, of other terrible and terrified men. Terrified someone was going to infect them with more poison and terrified someone might come and take their poison away. This terror moved through their eyes like quicksilver; you had to catch it on your first meeting, in the first minute, or you’d never see it again. But in that moment of original contact, they were still assembling themselves for you, so you could spy the fear animal as it dashed back into its cave, and Joe was sad to see that RD Pruitt’s animal was as big as a boar, which meant he’d be twice as mean and twice as unreasonable because he was twice as scared.

As RD sat, Joe offered his hand.

RD shook his head. “Don’t shake hands with papists.” He smiled and showed Joe his palms. “I mean no offense.”

“None taken.” Joe left the hand out there. “Help if I said I haven’t been in church for half my life?”

RD chuckled and shook his head some more.

Joe took his hand back and settled into his seat.

Chief Figgis said, “RD, word around the fire is you’ve taken to your old ways down here in Ybor.”

RD looked at his brother-in-law, eyes wide and innocent. “And how’s that?”

“We hear you’re sticking up places,” Figgis said.

“What kind of places?”

“Speakeasies.”

“Oh,” RD said, his eyes suddenly dark and small. “Mean them places don’t exist in a law-abiding town?”

“Yes.”

“Mean them places that are illegal and should therefore be shuttered?”

“That would be them,” Figgis said, “yes.”

RD shook his small head and his face returned to its cherubic innocence. “I just don’t know anything about that.”

Joe and Figgis exchanged a look, and Joe got the impression both of them were trying hard not to sigh.

“Ha-ha,” RD said. “Ha-ha.” He pointed at the two of them. “I’m just playing with you all. And you know that.”

Chief Figgis indicated Joe with a tilt of his head. “RD, this is a businessman who’s come to do business. I’m here to suggest you do it with him.”

“You do know that, right?” RD asked Joe.

“Sure.”

“What am I playing at?” RD said.

“You’re just joking around,” Joe said.

“I am. You know. You know.” He smiled at Chief Figgis. “He knows.”

“Okay, then,” Figgis said. “So we’re all friends.”

RD gave them a vaudevillian roll of the eyes. “I didn’t say that.”

Figgis blinked a few times. “Either case, we all understand one another.”

“This man”—RD pointed his finger in Joe’s face—“is a bootlegger and a fornicator with niggers. He needs to be tarred and feathered, not done business with.”

Joe smiled at the finger and considered snatching it out of the air, slamming it on the table, and snapping it at the knuckle.

Before he could, RD removed it and said, “I’m just joshing!” very loudly. “You take a joke, right?”

Joe said nothing.

RD reached across the table and chucked his fist off Joe’s shoulder. “You take a joke? Huh? Huh?”

Joe looked across at possibly the friendliest face he’d ever come across. A face that wished only the best of things for you. Kept looking until he saw the fear animal make a dash through RD’s sick and friendly eyes.

“I can take a joke.”

“Long as you don’t become one, right?” RD said.

Joe nodded. “My friends tell me you frequent the Parisian.”

RD narrowed his eyes like he was trying to recall the place.

Joe said, “I hear you’re fond of the French seventy-five they serve.”

RD hitched his trouser leg. “And if I was?”

“I’d say you should become more than a regular.”

“What’s more than a regular?”

“A partner.”

“What’s the stake?”

“Cut you in for ten percent of the house take.”

“You’d do that?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Let’s say I respect ambition.”

“That all?”

“And I recognize talent.”

“Well, that ought to be worth more than ten percent.”

“What were you thinking?”

RD’s face went as blandly beautiful as a wheat field. “I was thinking sixty.”

“You want sixty percent of the take of one of the most successful clubs in the city?”

RD nodded, blithe and bland.

“For doing what, exactly?”

“You give me my sixty percent, my friends might look on you less unkindly.”

“Who are your friends?” Joe asked.

“Sixty percent,” RD said, as if for the first time.

“Son,” Joe said, “I’m not giving you sixty percent.”

“Ain’t your son,” RD said mildly. “Ain’t nobody’s son.”

“Much to your father’s relief.”

“What’s that?”

“Fifteen percent,” Joe said.

“Beat you to death,” RD whispered.

At least that’s what Joe thought he whispered. He said, “What?”

RD rubbed his jaw hard enough Joe could hear the stubble bristle. He fixed Joe with eyes that were blank and too bright at the same time. “You know, that sounds like a right fair arrangement.”

“What does?”

“Fifteen percent. You wouldn’t go to twenty?”

Joe looked at Chief Figgis, then back at RD. “I’m thinking fifteen is about as generous as it gets for a job I’m not even asking you to show up to.”

RD scratched his stubble some more and looked down at the table for a bit. He looked up eventually, gave them his most boyish smile.

“You’re right, Mr. Coughlin. That is a fair deal, sir. And I’m just pleased as corn on the cob to agree to it.”

Chief Figgis leaned back in his chair, hands on his flat belly. “That’s great to hear, Robert Drew. I just knew we could come to an accord.”

“And we did,” RD said. “How will I pick up my cut?”

“Just drop by the bar every second Tuesday around seven at night,” Joe said. “Ask for the manager, Sian McAlpin.”

“Schwan?”

“Close enough,” Joe said.

“He a papist too?”

“He’s a she, and I never asked her.”

“Sian McAlpin. The Parisian. Tuesday nights.” RD slapped the table with his palms and stood up. “Well, that’s just great, I tell ya. A pleasure, Mr. Coughlin. Irv.” He tipped his hat to them both and gave them a half-wave, half-salute as he left.

For a full minute, no one said anything.

Eventually Joe turned in his chair a bit and asked Chief Figgis, “How soft is that kid’s head?”

“As a grape.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Do you think he’ll really take the deal?”

Figgis shrugged. “Time will tell.”

When RD showed up at the Parisian for his cut, he thanked Sian McAlpin when she handed it to him. He asked her to spell her name for him and told her it was right pretty when she did. He said he looked forward to their long association and had a drink at the bar. He was pleasant to all he encountered. Then he walked out, got in his car, and drove out past the Vayo Cigar Factory to Phyllis’s Place, the first speak where Joe had a drink in Ybor.

The bomb RD Pruitt threw into Phyllis’s Place wasn’t much of a bomb, but it didn’t have to be. The main room was so small a tall man couldn’t clap his hands without his elbows hitting the wall.

No one was killed, but a drummer named Cooey Cole lost his left thumb and never played again, and a seventeen-year-old girl who’d come in to pick up her daddy and drive him home lost a foot.

Joe sent three two-man teams to find the bugsy fuck, but RD Pruitt went hard to ground. They scoured the whole of Ybor, then the whole of West Tampa, then the whole of Tampa itself. Nobody could find him.

A week later, RD walked into another of Joe’s speaks on the east side, a place frequented almost exclusively by black Cubans. Walked in while the band was in full swing and the place was jumping. Ambled up to the stage and shot the bass trombonist in the knee and shot the singer in the stomach. He flipped an envelope onto the stage and walked out the back door.

The envelope was addressed to Sir Joseph Coughlin Nigger Fucker. Inside was a two-word note:

Sixty percent.

Joe went to see Kelvin Beauregard at his cannery. He took Dion and Sal Urso with him, and they met in Beauregard’s office at the back of the building. It looked down on the sealing floor. Several dozen women dressed in frocks and aprons with matching headbands stood on the sweltering floor around a serpentine system of conveyor belts. Beauregard watched them through a floor-to-ceiling window. He didn’t get up when Joe and his men entered. He didn’t look at them for a full minute. Then he turned in his chair and smiled and jerked his thumb at the glass.

“Got my eye on a new one,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Dion said, “New becomes old the second you drive it off the lot.”

Kelvin Beauregard raised an eyebrow. “Good point, good point. Gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

He took a cigar from a humidor on his desk but didn’t offer anyone else one.

Joe crossed his right leg over his left and hitched the crease in the ankle cuff. “We’d like to see if you could talk some sense into RD Pruitt.”

Beauregard said, “Ain’t too many people had success doing that in their lives.”

“Be that as it may,” Joe said, “we’d like you to try.”

Beauregard bit the end off his cigar and spit it into a wastebasket. “RD’s a grown man. He’s not requested my counsel, so it would be disrespectful to give it. Even if I agreed with the reason. And tell me, because I’m confused, what the reason would be?”

Joe waited until Beauregard had lit his cigar, waited while he stared through the flame at him and then stared through the smoke at him.

“In the interest of his own self-preservation,” Joe said, “RD needs to quit shooting up my clubs and meet with me so we can come to an accommodation.”

“Clubs? What kind of clubs?”

Joe looked over at Dion and Sal and said nothing.

“Bridge clubs?” Beauregard said. “Rotary clubs? I belong to the Greater Tampa Rotary Club, myself, and I don’t recall seeing you—”

“I come to you as an adult to discuss a piece of business,” Joe said, “and you want to play fucking games.”

Kelvin Beauregard put his feet up on his desk. “Is that what I want to do?”

“You sent this boy up against us. You knew he was crazy enough to do it. But all you’re going to do is get him killed.”

“I sent who?”

Joe took a long breath through his nostrils. “You’re the grand wizard of the Klan around here. Great, good for you. But you think we got where we got allowing a bunch of inbred shit packers like you and your friends to muscle us?”

“Ho, boy,” Beauregard said with a weary chuckle, “if you think that’s all we are, you are making a fatal miscalculation. We’re town clerks and bailiffs, jail guards and bankers. Police officers, deputies, even a judge. And we’ve decided something, Mr. Coughlin.” He lowered his feet from the desk. “We’ve decided we’re going to squeeze you and your spics and your dagos or we’re going to run you right out of town. If you’re dim enough to fight us, we’ll rain holy hellfire down on you and all you love.”

Joe said, “So what you’re threatening me with is a whole bunch of people who are more powerful than you?”

“Exactly.”

“Then why am I talking to you?” Joe said and nodded at Dion.

Kelvin Beauregard had time to say “What?” before Dion crossed the office and blew his brains all over his enormous window.

Dion lifted the cigar off Kelvin Beauregard’s chest and popped it in his mouth. He unscrewed the Maxim silencer from his pistol and hissed as he dropped it into the pocket of his raincoat.

“Thing’s hot.”

Sal Urso said, “You’re becoming such a little gal lately.”

They left the office and walked down the metal stairs to the cannery floor. Coming in, they’d worn fedoras pulled down over their foreheads and light-colored raincoats over flashy suits so that all the workers could see them for what they were—gangsters—and not look too long. They walked out the same way. If anyone recognized them from around Ybor, they’d know their reputation, and that would be enough to ensure a consensus of faulty vision on the sealing floor of the late Kelvin Beauregard’s cannery.

Joe sat on Chief Figgis’s front porch in Hyde Park, absently flicking the cover of his father’s watch open and closed, open and closed. The house was a classic bungalow with Arts and Crafts flourishes. Brown with eggshell trim. The chief had built the porch from wide planks of hickory, and he’d placed rattan furniture out there and a swing painted the same eggshell as the trim.

Chief Figgis pulled up in his car and got out and walked up the redbrick path between the perfectly manicured lawn.

“Come to my house?” he said to Joe.

“Save you the trouble of hauling me in.”

“Why would I haul you in?”

“Some of my men tell me you were looking for me.”

“Oh, right, right.” Figgis reached the porch and put his foot on the steps for a moment. “You shoot Kelvin Beauregard in the head?”

Joe squinted up at him. “Who’s Kelvin Beauregard?”

“There endeth my questions,” Figgis said. “Want a beer? It’s near beer but it’s not bad.”

“Much obliged,” Joe said.

Figgis went into the house and came back out with two near beers and a dog. The beers were cold and the dog was old, a gray bloodhound with soft ears the size of banana leaves. He lay on the porch between Joe and the door and snored with both eyes open.

“I need to get to RD,” Joe said after thanking Figgis for the beer.

“I expect you would feel that way.”

“You know how this ends if you don’t help me,” Joe said.

“No,” Chief Figgis said, “I don’t.”

“It ends with more bodies, more bloodshed, more newspapers writing about ‘Cigar City Slaughter’ and the like. It ends with you getting pushed out.”

“You too.”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Difference is, when you get pushed out, someone does it with a bullet to the back of your ear.”

“If he goes away,” Joe says, “the war ends. Peace returns.”

Figgis shook his head. “I’m not selling my wife’s brother down the river.”

Joe looked out on the street. It was a lovely brick street with several tidy bungalows cheerfully painted and some old Southern homes with farmers’ porches and even a couple of bowfront brownstones at the head of the street. The oaks were all stately and tall and the air smelled of gardenias.

“I don’t want to do this,” Joe said.

“Do what?”

“What you’re about to make me do.”

“I’m not making you do anything, Coughlin.”

“Yeah,” Joe said softly, “you are.”

He removed the first of the photos from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the porch beside Chief Figgis. Figgis knew he shouldn’t look at it. He just knew it. And for a moment, he kept his chin tilted hard toward his right shoulder. But then he turned his head back and looked down at what Joe had laid on his porch, two steps from the front door to his home, and his face was stricken white.

He looked up at Joe, then down at the photo and quickly away, and Joe went in for the kill.

He placed a second photo beside the first. “She didn’t make it to Hollywood, Irv. She just made it to Los Angeles.”

Irving Figgis took a quick glance at the second photo, enough that it burned his eyes. He shut them tight and whispered, “That’s not right, that’s not right,” over and over.

He wept. Sobbed, actually. Hands over his face, head down, back heaving.

When he stopped, he left his face in his hands, and the dog came over and lay beside him on the porch and pressed its head against Figgis’s outer thigh and shuddered, its lips flapping.

“We’ve got her with a special doctor,” Joe said.

Figgis lowered his hands, looked at Joe with hate in his red eyes. “What kind of doctor?”

“Kind gets people off heroin, Irv.”

Figgis held up one finger. “Do not ever call me by my Christian name again. You will call me Chief Figgis and Chief Figgis only for whatever days or years remain in our acquaintance. Are we clear?”

“We didn’t do this to her,” Joe said. “We just found her. And pulled her out of where she was, which was a pretty bad spot.”

“And then figured out how to profit from it.” Figgis pointed at the picture of his daughter with the three men and the metal collar and chain. “You people peddle in that. Whether it’s my daughter or someone else’s.”

“I don’t,” Joe said, knowing how feeble it sounded. “I just run rum.”

Figgis wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and then the backs of them. “The profit from the rum buys the organization the other things. Don’t you sit there, sir, and pretend it don’t. Name your price.”

“What?”

“Your price. For telling me where my daughter is.” He turned and looked at Joe. “You tell me. Tell me where she is.”

“She’s with a good doctor.”

Figgis thumped his fist off his porch.

“In a clean facility,” Joe said.

Figgis punched the floorboard.

“I can’t tell you,” Joe said.

“Until?”

Joe looked at him for a long time.

Eventually Figgis rose and the dog rose with him. He went through his screen door and Joe heard him dialing. When he spoke into the phone his voice was higher and hoarser than normal. “RD, you’re gonna meet this boy again and there ain’t another discussion to be had on that matter.”

On the porch, Joe lit a cigarette. A few blocks away, horns beeped distantly on Howard.

“Yeah,” Figgis said into the phone, “I’ll come too.”

Joe plucked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and gave it to the small breeze.

“You’ll be safe. I swear.”

He hung up and stood at the screen for some time before pushing the door open, and he and the dog came back out on the porch.

“He’ll meet you on Longboat Key, where they built that Ritz, at ten tonight. He said you come alone.”

“Okay.”

“When do I get her location?”

“When I walk out of my meeting with RD alive.”

Joe walked to his car.

“Do it yourself.”

He looked back at Figgis. “What?”

“If you’re going to kill him, be man enough to pull the trigger yourself. Ain’t no pride in having other people do what you’re too weak to do yourself.”

“Ain’t no pride in most things,” Joe said.

“You’re wrong. I wake up every morning, look myself in the mirror, and know I walk a righteous path. You?” Figgis let the question hang in the air.

Joe opened his car door, started to get in.

“Wait.”

Joe looked back at the man on the porch, who was now less of a man because Joe had stolen a crucial part of him and was going to drive off with it.

Figgis flashed his torn eyes at Joe’s suit jacket. His voice was shaky. “You got any more in there?”

Joe could feel them sitting in the pocket, as repugnant as abscessed gums.

“No.” He got into his car and drove off.

CHAPTER NINETEEN No Better Days

John Ringling, the circus impresario and great benefactor to Sarasota, had built the Ritz-Carlton on Longboat Key back in ’26, whereupon he’d promptly run into money problems and left it sitting there on a cove, its back to the Gulf, rooms with no furniture, walls with no crown molding.

Back when he’d first moved to Tampa, Joe had taken a dozen trips along the coastline, looking for spots to off-load contraband. He and Esteban had some boats running molasses into the Port of Tampa, and they had the town so locked up they only lost one in ten loads. But they also paid boats to run bottled rum, Spanish anís, and orujo straight from Havana to West Central Florida. This allowed them to skip the distilling process on U.S. soil, which removed a time-consuming step, but it left the boats open to a wider array of Volstead enforcers, including T-men, G-men, and the Coast Guard. And no matter how crazy and how talented a pilot Farruco Diaz was, all he could do was spot the laws coming, not stop them. (Which is why he continued to lobby for a machine gun and gunner to go with his machine gun mount.)

Until such a day as Joe and Esteban decided to declare open war on the Coast Guard and J. Edgar’s men, however, the small barrier islands that dotted this stretch of Gulf coastline—Longboat Key, Casey Key, Siesta Key, among others—were perfect places to duck and hide or temporarily stow a load.

They were also perfect places to get boxed in, because those same keys had only two ways on and off—one, the boat you’d sailed in on, and two, a bridge. One bridge. So if the laws were closing in, megaphones blaring, searchlights scouring, and you didn’t have a way to fly off the island, then you, sir, were going to jail.

Over the years, they’d temporarily dumped a dozen or so loads at the Ritz. Not Joe, personally, but he’d heard the stories about the place. Ringling had gotten the skeleton up, even installed the plumbing and subflooring, but then he’d walked away. Just left it sitting there, this three-hundred-room Spanish Mediterranean, so big that if they’d lit the rooms, you could probably see it from Havana.

Joe got there an hour early. He’d brought a flashlight with him, had asked Dion to pick him up a good one, and this one wasn’t bad, but it still needed frequent rests. The beam would gradually dim, begin to flicker, and then it would vanish entirely. Joe would have to shut it off for a few minutes and then turn it back on and go through the same process all over again. It occurred to him as he waited in the dark of what he believed had been meant to be a third-floor restaurant, that people were flashlights—they beamed, they dimmed, they flickered and died. It was a morbid and childish observation, but on the drive down he’d grown morbid and maybe a bit childish in his pique at RD Pruitt because he knew that RD was just one in a line. He wasn’t the exception, he was the rule. And if Joe succeeded in erasing him as a problem tonight, another RD Pruitt would come along soon after.

Because the business was illegal, it was, by necessity, dirty. And dirty businesses attracted dirty people. People of small minds and big cruelty.

Joe walked out onto the white limestone veranda and listened to the surf and Ringling’s imported royal palm fronds rustling in the warm night breeze.

The drys were losing; the country was pushing back against the Eighteenth. Prohibition would end. Maybe not for ten years, but it could be as soon as two. Either way, its obituary was written, it just hadn’t been published. Joe and Esteban had bought into importing companies up and down the Gulf Coast and along the Eastern Seaboard. They were cash poor right now, but the first morning alcohol became legal again, they could flip a switch and their operation would arise, gleaming, into the bright new day. The distilleries were all in place, the shipping companies currently specializing in glassware, the bottling plants servicing soda pop companies. By the afternoon of that first morning, they’d be up and running, ready to take over what they estimated to be well within their reach—16 to 18 percent of the U.S. rum market.

Joe closed his eyes and sucked in the sea air and wondered how many more RD Pruitts he’d have to deal with before he achieved that goal. Truth was, he didn’t understand an RD, a guy who came at the world wanting to beat it at some competition that existed only in his head, a battle to the death, no question, because death was the only blessing and the only peace he’d ever find on this earth. And maybe it wasn’t only RD and his ilk who bothered Joe; maybe it was what you had to do to put an end to them. You had to kneel down in the grime with them. You had to show a good man like Irving Figgis pictures of his firstborn with a cock in her ass and a chain around her neck, track marks running down her arm like garter snakes baked crisp by the sun.

He hadn’t needed to put the second picture down in front of Irving Figgis, but he’d done so because it made things go quicker. What concerned him more and more about this business to which he’d hitched his star was that every time you sold off another piece of yourself in the name of expediency, the easier it got.

The other night, he and Graciela had gone out for drinks at the Riviera and dinner at the Columbia and then caught a show at the Satin Sky. They’d been accompanied by Sal Urso, who was Joe’s full-time driver now, and their car was shadowed by Lefty Downer, who watched them when Dion was dealing with other matters. The bartender at the Riviera had tripped and fallen to one knee trying to get Graciela’s chair pulled out for her before she arrived at the table. When the waitress at the Columbia spilled a drink on the table and some of it leaked onto Joe’s pants, the maître d’, the manager, and eventually the owner had come to the table to apologize. Joe then had to convince them not to fire the waitress. He argued that her mistake was honest, and that her service was, in all other respects, impeccable and had been every time they’d been lucky to have her service their table. (Service. Joe hated that word.) The men had relented, of course, but as Graciela reminded him on their way to Satin Sky, what else would they say to Joe’s face? See if she still has a job next week, Graciela said. At the Satin Sky, the tables were all taken, but then before Joe and Graciela could turn back to the car where Sal waited, the manager, Pepe, rushed over to them and assured them that four patrons had just paid their check. Joe and Graciela watched two men approach a table of four, whisper in the ears of the couples sitting there, and hasten their exit with hands on their elbows.

At the table, neither Joe nor Graciela spoke for some time. They drank their drinks, they watched the band. Graciela looked around the room and then out at Sal standing by the car, his eyes never leaving them. She looked at the patrons and the waiters who pretended not to watch them.

She said, “I’ve become the people my parents worked for.”

Joe said nothing because every response he thought of would be a lie.

Something was getting lost in them, something that was starting to live by day, where the swells lived, where the insurance salesmen and the bankers lived, where the civic meetings were held and the little flags were waved at the Main Street parades, where you sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself.

But along the sidewalks lit by dim, yellow lamps and in the alleys and abandoned lots, people begged for food and blankets. And if you got past them, their children worked the next corner.

The reality was, he liked the story of himself. Liked it better than the truth of himself. In the truth of himself, he was second-class and grubby and always out of step. He still had his Boston accent and didn’t know how to dress right, and he thought too many thoughts that most people would find “funny.” The truth of himself was a scared little boy, mislaid by his parents like reading glasses on a Sunday afternoon, treated to random kindnesses by older brothers who came without notice and departed without warning. The truth of himself was a lonely boy in an empty house, waiting for someone to knock on his bedroom door and ask if he was okay.

The story of himself, on the other hand, was of a gangster prince. A man who had a full-time driver and bodyguard. A man of wealth and stature. A man for whom people abandoned their seats simply because he coveted them.

Graciela was right—they had become the people her parents worked for. But they were better versions. And her parents, hungry as they were, would have expected no less. You couldn’t fight the Haves. The only thing you could do was become them to such a degree that they came to you for what they had not.

He left the veranda and reentered the hotel. He turned his flashlight back on, saw the great wide room where high society had been poised to drink and eat and dance and do whatever else it was that high society did.

What else did high society do?

He couldn’t think of an answer right off.

What else did people do?

They worked. When they could find it. Even when they couldn’t, they raised families, drove their cars if they could afford the upkeep and gas. They went to movies or listened to the radio or caught a show. They smoked.

And the rich…?

They gambled.

Joe could see it in a great smash of light. While the rest of the country lined up for soup and begged for spare change, the rich remained rich. And idle. And bored.

This restaurant he walked through, this restaurant that never was, wasn’t a restaurant at all. It was a casino floor. He could see the roulette wheel in the center, the craps tables over by the south wall, the card tables along the north wall. He saw a Persian carpet and crystal chandeliers with ruby and diamond pendants.

He left the room and moved down the main corridor. The conference rooms he passed became music halls—big band in one, vaudeville in another, Cuban jazz in the third, maybe even a movie theater in the fourth.

The rooms. He ran up to the fourth floor and looked at the ones overlooking the Gulf. Jesus, they were breathtaking. Every floor would have its own butler, standing at the ready when you got off the lifts. He’d be at the service of all guests on that floor twenty-four hours a day. Every room would, of course, have a radio. And a ceiling fan. And maybe those French toilets he’d heard about, ones shot water up your ass. They’d have masseuses on call, twelve hours of room service, two, no three, concierges. He walked back down to the second floor. The flashlight needed another rest, so he shut it off, because he knew the staircase now. On the second floor, he found the ballroom. It was in the center of the floor with a large viewing rotunda above it, a place to stroll on warm spring nights and watch others of bottomless wealth dance under the stars painted on the domed roof.

What he saw, clearer than any clear he’d ever known, was that the rich would come in here for the dazzle and the elegance and the chance to risk it all against a rigged game, as rigged as the one they’d been running on the poor for centuries.

And he’d indulge it. He’d encourage it. And he’d profit from it.

Nobody—not Rockefeller, not Du Pont or Carnegie or J. P. Morgan—beat the house. Unless they were the house. And in this casino, the only house was him.

He shook his flashlight several times and turned it on.

For some reason, he was surprised to find them waiting for him—RD Pruitt and two other men. RD, in a stiff tan suit and a black string tie. The cuffs of his trousers stopped just short of his black shoes, exposing the white socks underneath. He had two boys with him—’shine runners by the look of them, smelling of corn, sour mash, and methanol. No suits on these boys—just short ties on short collar shirts, wool trousers held up by suspenders.

They turned their flashlights on Joe, and it was all he could do not to blink into them.

RD said, “You came.”

“I came.”

“Where’s my brother-in-law?”

“He didn’t come.”

“Just as well.” He pointed at the boy to his right. “This here is Carver Pruitt, my cousin.” He pointed at the boy on his left. “And his cousin on his mama’s side? Harold LaBute.” He turned to them. “Boys, this here is the one killed Kelvin. Careful now, he might decide to kill you all.”

Carver Pruitt raised his rifle to his shoulder. “Not likely.”

“This one?” RD sidestepped along the ballroom, pointing at Joe. “He’s rat tricky. You take your eye off that pea shooter, I promise it’ll be in his hands.”

“Aww,” Joe said, “shucks.”

“You a man of your word?” RD asked Joe.

“Depends on who I give it to.”

“So you ain’t come alone like I ordered.”

“No,” Joe said, “I ain’t come alone.”

“Well, where they at?”

“Shit, RD, I tell you that, I spoil the fun.”

“We watched you come in,” RD said. “We been sitting out there three hours. You show up an hour early, think you get the drop on us?” He chuckled. “So we know you came alone. How you like that?”

“Trust me,” Joe said, “I’m not alone.”

RD crossed the ballroom, and his guns followed him until they were all standing in the center.

The switchblade Joe had brought with him was already open, the base of the handle tucked lightly under the band of the wristwatch he wore solely for this occasion. All he had to do was flex his wrist and the blade would drop into his palm.

“I don’t want no sixty percent.”

“I know that,” Joe said.

“What you think I want then?”

“Don’t know,” Joe said. “I suspect? I suspect a return to, I dunno, the way things used to be? Am I warm?”

“You about on the griddle.”

“But there wasn’t no way things used to be,” Joe said. “That’s our problem, RD. I spent two years in prison doing nothing but reading. Know what I found out?”

“No. You tell me, though, won’t ya?”

“Found out we were always fucked. Always killing each other and raping and stealing and laying waste. It’s who we are, RD. Ain’t no Used to Be. Ain’t no better days.”

RD said, “Uh-huh.”

“You know what this place could be?” Joe said. “You realize what we could do with this spot?”

“I do not.”

“Build the biggest casino in the United States.”

“Ain’t nobody going to allow gambling.”

“Gotta disagree with you, RD. Whole country’s in the tank, banks going under, cities going bankrupt, people out of work.”

“ ’Cause we got us a Communist for a president.”

“No,” Joe said, “not even close, actually. But I’m not here to debate politics with you, RD. I’m here to tell you that the reason Prohibition will end is because—”

“Prohibition ain’t gonna end in a God-fearing country.”

“Yes, it will. Because the country needs all the millions it didn’t get the past ten years on tariffs and import taxes and distribution taxes and interstate transport levies and, shit, you name it—could be billions they gave away. And they’re going to ask me and people like me—you, for example—to make millions of dollars selling legal booze so we can save the country for them. And that’s exactly why, in the spirit of the moment, they’ll allow this state to legalize gambling. Long as we buy off the right county commissioners, the right city councillors and state senators. We could do that. And you could be part of it, RD.”

“I don’t want to be part of nothing with you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To tell you to your face, mister, that you’re a cancer. You’re the pestilence that gonna bring this country to its knees. You and your nigger whore girlfriend and your dirty spic friends and your dirty dago friends. I’m a take the Parisian. Not sixty percent—the whole place. Then? I’m a take all your clubs. I’m a take everything you got. Might even go by your fancy house and tear me off a piece that nigger girl ’fore I cut her throat.” He looked back at his boys and laughed. He turned to Joe again. “You ain’t got this yet, but you leaving town, boy. You just forgot to pack your bags.”

Joe looked into RD’s bright, mean eyes. Stared deep into them until he got all the way past anything bright and was left with nothing but the mean. It was like staring into the eyes of a dog beat so much and starved so much and uglied so much that all it had to give back to the world was its teeth.

In that moment, he pitied him.

RD Pruitt saw that pity in Joe’s eyes. And what surged up in his own was a howl of outrage. And a knife. Joe saw the knife coming in his eyes and by the time he glanced down at RD’s hand, he’d already buried it in Joe’s abdomen.

Joe gripped RD’s wrist, gripped it fiercely, so RD couldn’t move that knife right, left, up, or down. Joe’s own knife clattered to the floor. RD struggled against Joe’s grip, both their teeth gritted now.

“I got you,” RD said. “I got you.”

Joe removed his hands from RD’s wrist and punched the heels of his palms into the center of RD and chucked him back. The knife slid back out and Joe fell on the floor and RD laughed and the two boys with him laughed.

“Got you!” RD said and walked toward Joe.

Joe watched his own blood drip from the blade. He held up a hand. “Wait.”

RD stopped. “That’s what everyone says.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” Joe looked up into the darkness, saw the stars on the dome above the rotunda. “Okay. Now.”

“Then who you talking to?” RD said, a step too slow, always a step too slow, which was probably what made him so ass-dumb mean.

Dion and Sal Urso turned on the searchlights they’d lugged up to the rotunda this afternoon. It was like a harvest moon popping out from behind a bank of storm clouds. The ballroom turned white.

When the bullets rained down, RD Pruitt, his cousin, Carver, and Carver’s cousin, Harold, did the bone-yard foxtrot, like they were having terrible coughing fits while running across hot coals. Dion, of late, had turned into an artist with the Thompson, and he stitched an X up one side and down the other of RD Pruitt’s body. By the time they stopped firing, scraps of the three men were flung all over the ballroom.

Joe heard their footsteps on the stairs as they ran down to him.

Dion called to Sal when they entered the ballroom, “Get the doc’, get the doc’.”

Sal’s footsteps ran the other way as Dion ran over to Joe and ripped open his shirt.

“Oooh, Nellie.”

“What? Bad?”

Dion shrugged off his coat and then tore off his own shirt. He wadded it up and pressed it to the wound. “Hold it there.”

“Bad?” Joe repeated.

“Ain’t good,” Dion said. “How do you feel?”

“Feet are cold. Stomach’s on fire. I want to scream actually.”

“Scream, then,” Dion said. “Ain’t no one else around.”

Joe did. The force of it shocked him. It echoed all over the hotel.

“Feel better?”

“You know what?” Joe said. “No.”

“Then don’t do it again. Well, he’s on his way. The doc’.”

“You bring him with you?”

Dion nodded. “He’s on the boat. Sal’s already hit the signal light by now. He’ll be motoring up to the dock lickety-split.”

“That’s good.”

“Why didn’t you make some kind of noise when he put it in? We couldn’t fucking see you up there. We just kept waiting for the signal.”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “It seemed important not to give him the satisfaction. Oh, Jesus, this hurts.”

Dion gave him his hand and Joe clenched it.

“Why’d you let him get so close if you weren’t going to stab him?”

“So what?”

“So close? With the knife? You were supposed to stab him.”

“I shouldn’t have shown him those pictures, D.”

“You showed him pictures?”

“No. What? No. I mean Figgis. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Christ. That’s what we had to do to put this fucking mad dog down.”

“It’s not the right price.”

“But it’s the price. You don’t go letting this piece of shit stab you because the price is the price.”

“Okay.”

“Hey. Stay awake.”

“Stop slapping my face.”

“Stop closing your eyes.”

“It’s going to make a nice casino.”

“What?”

“Trust me,” Joe said.

CHAPTER TWENTY Mi Gran Amor

Five weeks.

That’s how long he spent in a hospital bed. First in the Gonzalez Clinic on Fourteenth, just up the block from the Circulo Cubano, and then, under the alias Rodriguo Martinez, at the Centro Asturiano Hospital twelve blocks east. The Cubans might have fought with the Spaniards and the southern Spaniards might have fought with the northern Spaniards, and all of them had their beefs with the Italians and the American Negroes, but when it came to medical care, Ybor was a mutual aid collective. Everyone down there knew that no one in white Tampa would lift a finger to stop up a hole in their hearts if there was a Caucasian nearby who needed treatment for a fucking hangnail.

Joe was worked on by a team that Graciela and Esteban assembled—a Cuban surgeon who performed the original laparotomy, a Spanish specialist in thoracic medicine who oversaw the abdominal wall reconstruction during the second, third, and fourth surgeries, and an American doctor on the forefront of pharmacology who had access to the tetanus toxoid vaccine and regulated the administering of the morphine.

All the initial work done on Joe—the irrigation, cleansing, exploration, debridement, and suturing—had been done at the Gonzalez Clinic, but word slipped out he was there. Midnight riders of the KKK showed up the second night, galloping their horses up and down Ninth, the oily stench of their torches climbing through the window grates. Joe wasn’t awake for any of this—he would never have more than scant recollection of the first two weeks after the stabbing—but Graciela would tell him all about it during the months of his recovery.

When the riders departed, thundering out of Ybor along Seventh and firing their rifles in the air, Dion sent men to follow them—two men per horse. Just before dawn, unknown assailants entered the homes of eight local men across the Greater Tampa/St. Petersburg area and beat those men nearly to death, some in front of their families. When a wife intervened in Temple Terrace, they broke her arms with a bat. When a son in Egypt Lake tried to impede them, they tied the boy to a tree and let the ants and mosquitoes have at him. The most prominent of the victims, the dentist Victor Toll, was rumored to have replaced Kelvin Beauregard as the head of the town Klavern. Dr. Toll was tied to the hood of his car. He was forced to lie there in a soup of his blood and smell his own house burn to the ground.

This effectively ended the power of the Ku Klux Klan in Tampa for three years, but the Pescatore Family and the Coughlin-Suarez Gang had no way of knowing that, so they took no chances and moved Joe to the Centro Asturiano Hospital. There a surgical drain was inserted to offset the internal bleeding, the source of which mystified the original doctor, which is why they sent for the second doctor, a gentle Spaniard with the most beautiful fingers Graciela had ever seen.

By this point, Joe was mostly out of danger for hemorrhagic shock, the main killer of abdominal knifing victims. Second to that was liver damage, and his liver had been given a clean bill of health. This, the doctors told him much later, was thanks to his father’s watch, which bore a new scrape on the dust cover. The point of the knife had glanced off the cover first, altering its path, however slightly.

The first doctor had done his best to check for damage to the duodenum, the rectum, the colon, the gallbladder, the spleen, and the terminal ileum, but the conditions had not been ideal. Joe had been stabilized on the dirty floor of an abandoned building and then moved across the bay on a boat. By the time they got him into an operating room, more than an hour had passed.

The second doctor who examined Joe suspected, due to the angle the blade had traveled during its peritoneal penetration, that there was damage to the spleen, and they cut Joe open again. The Spanish doctor was on the money. He repaired the nick in Joe’s spleen and removed the toxic bile that had begun to ulcerate his abdominal wall, though some damage was already done. Joe would require two more surgeries before the month was out.

After the second surgery, he woke to someone sitting at the foot of his bed. His vision was blurred to the point that it turned the air to gauze. But he could make out a thick head and a long jaw. And a tail. The tail thumped against the sheet over his leg and the panther came into focus. It stared at him with its hungry yellow eyes. Joe’s throat constricted and the flesh that covered it was slick with sweat.

The panther licked its upper lip and nose.

It yawned, and Joe wanted to close his eyes in the face of those magnificent teeth, the white of every bone they’d ever cracked in half and torn the meat from.

The mouth closed and the yellow eyes found him again and the cat placed its front paws on his stomach and walked up his body to his head.

Graciela said, “What cat?”

He stared up into her face, blinking at the sweat. It was morning; the air coming through the windows was cool and bore the scent of camellias.

After the surgeries, he was also prohibited from having sex for three months. Alcohol, Cuban food, shellfish, nuts, and corn were forbidden. If he feared that the lack of lovemaking would drive him and Graciela apart (and he did; so did she), it actually had the opposite effect. By the second month, he learned a different way to satisfy her, using his mouth, a way he’d stumbled upon by accident a few times over the years, but which now became his sole method of giving her pleasure. Kneeling before her, her ass cupped in his hands, his mouth covering the gateway to her womb, a gateway he’d come to think of as sacred and sinful and luxuriously slippery all at the same time, he felt he’d finally found something worth taking a knee for. If surrendering all preconceived notions of what a man was expected to give and receive from a woman was what it took to feel as pure and useful as he felt with his head between Graciela’s thighs, then he wished he’d lost those notions years ago. Her initial protestations—no, you can’t; a man does not do that; I must bathe; you cannot possibly like the taste—gave way to something bordering on addiction. For the final month before she could return the favor, Joe realized they were averaging five acts of oral gratification a day.

When the doctors finally cleared him, he and Graciela closed the shutters of their home on Ninth and filled the icebox on the second floor with food and champagne and confined themselves to the canopy bed or the claw-foot tub for two days. Near the end of the second day, lying in the red dusk, the shutters reopened to the street, the ceiling fan drying their bodies, Graciela said, “There will never be another.”

“What’s that?”

“Man.” She ran her palm over his patchwork abdomen. “You are my man until death.”

“Yeah?”

She pressed her open mouth to his neck and exhaled. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“What about Adan?”

For the first time he saw contempt enter her eyes at the mention of her husband.

“Adan is no man. You, mi gran amor, are a man.”

“You’re certainly all woman,” he said. “Christ, I get so lost in you.”

“I get lost in you.”

“Well, then…” He looked around the room. He’d waited so long for this day, he wasn’t sure how to treat it now that it had arrived. “You’ll never get a divorce in Cuba, right?”

She shook her head. “Even if I could return under my own name, the Church does not allow it.”

“So you’ll always be married to him.”

“In name,” she said.

“But what’s a name?” he said.

She laughed. “Agreed.”

He moved her on top of him and looked up her brown body into her brown eyes. “Tú eres mi esposa.”

She wiped at her eyes with both hands, a small wet laugh escaping her. “And you are my husband.”

“Para siempre.”

She placed her warm palms on his chest and nodded. “Forever.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Light My Way

Business continued to boom.

Joe began greasing the skids on the Ritz deal. John Ringling was open to selling the building but not the land. So Joe had his lawyers work with Ringling’s to see if they could reach an accommodation that would suit both. Lately the two sides had investigated a ninety-nine-year lease but had gotten hung up on air rights with the county. Joe had one set of bagmen buying the inspectors in Sarasota County, another set up in Tallahassee working on state politicians, and a third group in Washington targeting members of the IRS and senators who frequented whorehouses, gambling parlors, and opium dens the Pescatore Family had stakes in.

His earliest success was to get bingo decriminalized in Pinellas County. He then got a statewide bingo decriminalization bill on the docket, to be heard by the state legislature in the autumn session and possibly put on the ballot as early as 1932. His friends in Miami, a much easier town to buy, helped soften the state even further when Dade and Broward Counties legalized pari-mutuel betting. Joe and Esteban had crawled out on a limb to buy up land for their Miami friends, and now that land was being turned into racetracks.

Maso had flown down to take a look at the Ritz. He’d survived a bout with cancer recently, though no one but Maso and his doctors knew what kind. He claimed to have come through it with flying colors, though it had left him bald and frail. Some even whispered that his thinking had grown muddy, though Joe saw no evidence of it. He’d loved the property and he’d liked Joe’s logic—if there was ever a time to strike at the gambling taboos, it was now, as Prohibition tragically collapsed before their eyes. The money they’d lose on the legalization of booze would go right into the government’s pocket, but the money they’d lose on legal casino and racetrack taxation would be offset by the profit they’d make from people dumb enough to bet against the house on a mass scale.

The bagmen also began to report back that Joe’s hunch was looking good. The country was soft enough for this. You had cash-strapped municipalities from one end of Florida to the other and one end of the country to the other. Joe had sent his men out with pledges of infinite dividends—a casino tax, a hotel tax, a food and beverage tax, an entertainment tax, a room tax, a liquor license tax, plus—and all the pols loved this one—an excess revenue tax. If, on any given day, the casino cleared more than eight hundred thousand dollars, the casino would kick 2 percent of it back to the state. Truth was, any time the casino came close to clearing eight hundred large, they’d skim the take blind. But the politicians with their small plates and their big eyes didn’t need to know that.

By late ’31, he had two junior senators, nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four senior senators, thirteen county representatives, eleven city councillors, and two judges in his pocket. He’d also bought off his old KKK rival, Hopper Hewitt, editor of the Tampa Examiner, who’d begun running editorials and hard news stories that questioned the logic of allowing so many people to starve when a first-class casino on Florida’s Gulf Coast could put them all to work, which would give them the money to buy up all those foreclosed houses, which would need lawyers to come off the breadlines to do the closings proper, who would need clerical staff to make sure it was written up nice.

As Joe drove him to his train for the return journey, Maso said, “Whatever you need to do on this, you do.”

“Thanks,” Joe said, “I will.”

“You’ve done some real good work down here.” Maso patted his knee. “Don’t think it won’t be taken into consideration.”

Joe didn’t know what his work could be “taken into consideration” for. He’d built something down here out of the mud, and Maso was talking to him like he’d found him a new grocer to shake down. Maybe there was something to those rumors about the old man’s thinking of late.

“Oh,” Maso said as they neared Union Station, “I heard you still got a rogue out there. That true?”

It took Joe a few seconds. “You mean that ’shiner won’t pay his dues?”

“That’s the one,” Maso said.

The ’shiner was Turner John Belkin. He and his three sons sold white lightning out of their stills in unincorporated Palmetto. Turner John Belkin meant no harm to anyone; he just wanted to sell to the people he’d been selling to for a generation, run some games out of his back parlor, run some girls out of a house down the street. But he wouldn’t come into the fold, no matter what. Wouldn’t pay tribute, wouldn’t sell Pescatore product, wouldn’t do anything but go about his business as he’d always run it, and his father and grandfathers had run it before him, going back to when Tampa was still called Fort Brooke and yellow fever killed three times more people than old age.

“I’m working on him,” Joe said.

“I hear you been working on him for six months now.”

“Three,” Joe admitted.

“Then get rid of him.”

The car pulled to a stop. Seppe Carbone, Maso’s personal bodyguard, opened the door for him and stood waiting in the sun.

“I’ve got guys working on it,” Joe said.

“I don’t want you to have guys working on it. I want you to end it. Personally, if you have to.”

Maso got out of the car, and Joe followed him to the train to see him off even though Maso said he didn’t need to. But the truth was, Joe wanted to see Maso leave, needed to, so he could confirm that it was okay to breathe again, to relax. Having Maso around was like having an uncle move in with you for a couple of days and never leave. And worse, the uncle thought he was doing you a favor.

A few days after Maso left, Joe sent a couple guys to put a little scare into Turner John, but he put a scare into them instead, beat one into a hospital, and this without his sons or a weapon.

Joe met with Turner John a week later.

He told Sal to stay behind in the car and stood on the dirt road out front of the man’s copper-roof shack, the porch collapsed on one end, just a Coca-Cola icebox sitting on the other end, so red and shiny Joe suspected it was polished every day.

Turner John’s sons, three beefy boys in cotton long johns and not much else, not even shoes (though one wore a red wool sweater with snowflakes on it for some ungodly reason), frisked Joe and took his Savage .32 and then frisked him again.

After that, Joe went inside the shack and sat across from Turner John at a wood table with uneven legs. He tried adjusting the table, gave up, and then asked Turner John why he’d beaten his men. Turner John, a tall, skinny, and severe-looking man with eyes and hair the same brown as his suit, said because they’d come upon him with a threat in their eyes so clear wasn’t no point waiting for it to leave their mouths.

Joe asked if he knew this meant Joe would have to kill him to save face. Turner John said he suspected as much.

“So,” Joe said, “why you doing it? Why not just pay a bit of tribute?”

“Mister,” Turner John said, “your father still with us?”

“No, he passed.”

“But you still his son, am I right?”

“I am.”

“You have twenty great-grandkids, you still be that man’s son.”

Joe was unprepared for the flood of emotion that found him in that moment. He had to look away from Turner John before that flood found his eyes. “Yes, I will.”

“You want to make him proud, right? Make him see you for a man?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Of course I do.”

“Well, I’m the same way. I had me a fine daddy. Only beat me hard when I had it coming and never when he’d taken to drink. Mostly, he’d just whack my head when I snored. I’m a champeen in the snoring, sir, and my daddy just couldn’t abide it when he was dog tired. Other than that, he was the finest of men. And a son wants his father to be able to look down and see his teachings took root. Right about now, Daddy’s watching me and saying, ‘Turner John, I ain’t raised you to pay tribute to another man didn’t get down in the muck with you to earn his keep.’ ” He showed Joe his big scarred palms. “You want my money, Mr. Coughlin? Well then you best set to working with me and my boys on the mash and helping us work our farm, till the soil, rotate the crops, milk the cows. You follow?”

“I follow.”

“Else, ain’t nothing to discuss.”

Joe looked at Turner John, then up at the ceiling. “You really think he’s looking?”

Turner John revealed a mouth full of silver teeth. “Mister, I know he is.”

Joe unzipped his fly and withdrew the derringer he’d taken off Manny Bustamente a few years ago. He pointed it at Turner John’s chest.

Turner John unleashed a long, slow breath.

Joe said, “Man sets to a job, he’s supposed to complete it. Right?”

Turner John licked his lower lip and never took his eyes off the gun.

“You know what kind of gun this is?” Joe asked.

“It’s a woman’s derringer.”

“No,” Joe said, “it’s a What Coulda Been.” He stood. “You do whatever you want out here in Palmetto. You get me?”

Turner John blinked an affirmative.

“But don’t you let me see your label or taste your product in Hillsborough or Pinellas County. Or Sarasota neither, Turner John. We clear on that?”

Turner John blinked again.

“I need to hear you say it,” Joe said.

“We clear,” Turner John said. “You have my word.”

Joe nodded. “What’s your father thinking now?”

Turner John stared past the gun barrel, up Joe’s arm and into his eyes. “Thinking he came a damn sight close to having to put up with my snoring again.”

As Joe maneuvered to legalize gambling and buy the hotel, Graciela opened lodging of her own. Whereas Joe was after the Waldorf salad crowd, Graciela built accommodations for the fatherless and the husbandless. It was a national shame that men these days were leaving their families like armies during wartime. They left Hoovervilles and tenement apartments or, in the case of Tampa, the shotgun shacks locals called casitas, went up the road to get milk or cadge a cigarette or because they’d heard a rumor of work, and they never came back. Without men to protect them, the women were sometimes victims of rape or forced into the basement levels of prostitution. The children, suddenly fatherless and possibly motherless, entered the streets and the back roads, and the news that returned of them was rarely good.

Graciela came to Joe one night as he sat in the tub. She brought them two cups of coffee laced with rum. She removed her clothes and slipped under the water across from him and asked him if she could take his name.

“You want to marry me?”

“Not in the Church. I can’t.”

“Okay…”

“But we are married, are we not?”

“Yes.”

“So I would like to call myself by your surname.”

“Graciela Dominga Maela Rosario Maria Concetta Corrales Coughlin?”

She slapped his arm. “I don’t have that many names.”

He leaned in for a kiss, then leaned back. “Graciela Coughlin?”

“Sí.”

He said, “I’d be honored.”

“Ah,” she said, “good. I’ve bought some buildings.”

“You’ve bought some buildings?”

She looked at him, those brown eyes as innocent as a deer’s. “Three. That, um, cluster? Yes. That cluster by the old Perez factory?”

“On Palm?”

She nodded. “And I would like to give shelter there to abandoned wives and their children.”

Joe wasn’t surprised. Lately Graciela had talked about little else but these women.

“What happened to Latin American politics for a cause?”

“I fell in love with you.”

“So?”

“So you restrict my mobility.”

He laughed. “I do, huh?”

“Terribly.” She smiled. “It can work. Maybe someday we could even profit from it and it could stand as a model for the rest of the world.”

Graciela dreamed of land reform and farmers’ rights and a fair distribution of wealth. She believed in fairness, essentially, a concept Joe was certain had left the earth about the time the earth left diapers.

“I don’t know about a model for the rest of the world.”

“Why can’t it work?” she said to him. “A just world.” She splashed bubbles at him to show she was only half serious, but there was no “half” about it really.

“You mean one where everyone lives on what they need and sits around singing songs and, shit, smiling all the time?”

She flicked suds into his face. “You know what I mean. A good world. Why can’t it be so?”

“Greed,” he said. He raised his arms to their bathroom. “Look how we live.”

“But you give back. You gave a quarter of our money last year to the Gonzalez Clinic.”

“They saved my life.”

“The year before you built the library.”

“So they’d get books I like to read.”

“But all the books are in Spanish.”

“How do you think I learned the language?”

She propped her foot on his shoulder and used his hair to scratch an itch along the outside of her arch. She left it there and he gave it a kiss and found himself, as he often did at times like these, experiencing a peace so total he couldn’t imagine a heaven that could compare. Compare to her voice in his eardrums, her friendship in his pocket, her foot on his shoulder.

“We can do good,” she said, looking down.

“We do,” he said.

“After so much bad,” she said softly.

She was looking into the suds below her breasts, disappearing into herself, loosing herself from this tub. Any moment, she’d reach for a towel.

“Hey,” he said.

Her eyelids rose.

“We’re not bad. Maybe we’re not good. I dunno. I just know we’re all scared.”

“Who’s scared?” she said.

“Who isn’t? The whole world. We tell ourselves we believe in this god or that god, this afterlife or that one, and maybe we do, but what we’re all thinking at the same time is, ‘What if we’re wrong? What if this is it? Well if it is, shit, I better get me a real big house and a real big car and a whole bunch of nice tie pins and a pearl-handled walking stick and a—’ ”

She was laughing now.

“‘—a toilet that washes my ass and my armpits. Because I need one of those.’ ” He’d been chuckling too, but the chuckles trailed off into the suds. “‘But, wait, I believe in God. Just to be safe. But I believe in greed too. Just to be safe.’ ”

“And that’s all it is—we’re scared?”

“I don’t know if that’s all it is,” he said. “I just know we’re scared.”

She pulled the suds around her neck like a scarf and nodded. “I want it to matter that we were here.”

“I know you do. Look, you want to rescue these women and their kids? Good. I love you for that. But some bad people are going to want to stop some of those women from leaving their grips.”

“I know that,” she said in a singsong that told him he was naive to think she didn’t. “That’s why I’ll need a couple of your men.”

“A couple?”

“Well, four for starters. But, mi amado?” She smiled at him. “I want the toughest ones you’ve got.”

That was also the year Chief Irving Figgis’s daughter, Loretta, returned to Tampa.

She got off the train accompanied by her father, their arms entwined. Loretta was dressed from head to toe in black, as if she were in mourning, and the way Irv held so tight to her arm, maybe she was.

Irv locked her up in his house in Hyde Park, and no one saw either of them for the whole of the season. Irv had taken a leave of absence after he’d gone to L.A. to retrieve her and he extended it through the fall when he got back. His wife moved out, taking his son with her, and neighbors said the only sound they ever heard from over there was the sound of praying. Or chanting. There was some argument over the particulars.

When they emerged from the house at the end of October, Loretta wore white. At a Pentecostal tent meeting later that evening, she declared that her decision to wear white hadn’t been hers at all; it had been Jesus Christ’s, to whose teachings she would now be wed. Loretta took the stage at the tent in Fiddlers Cove Field that night and she spoke of her descent into the world of vice, of the demons alcohol and heroin and marijuana that had led her there, of wanton fornication that led to prostitution that led to more heroin and nights of such sinful debauchery she knew Jesus had blocked them from her memory in order to keep her from taking her own life. And why was he so interested in keeping her alive? Because he wanted her to speak his truth to the sinners of Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Bradenton. And if he saw fit, she was to carry that message across Florida and even across these here United States.

What differentiated Loretta from so many speakers who stood before worshippers in the revival tents was that Loretta spoke with no fire and no brimstone. She never raised her voice. She spoke so softly, in fact, that many a listener had to lean forward. Occasionally glancing sideways at her father, who’d grown quite stern and unapproachable since her return, she gave plaintive testimony to a fallen world. She didn’t claim to know the will of God so much as she claimed to hear the crestfallen dismay of Christ at what his children had gotten up to. So much good could be salvaged from this world, so much virtue could be reaped, if it were virtue that was sown in the first place.

“They are saying this country will soon return to the despair of wanton alcohol consumption, of husbands beating their wives because of the rum, of carrying home venereal disease because of the rye, of falling to sloth and losing their jobs and the banks putting even more little ones out in the street because of the gin. Don’t blame the banks. Don’t blame the banks,” she whispered. “Blame those who profit from sin, from the peddling of flesh and the weakening of it through spirits. Blame the bootleggers and the bordello owners and those who allow them to spread their filth through our fair city and in God’s sight. Pray for them. And then ask God for guidance.”

God apparently guided some of the good citizens of Tampa to raid a couple of Coughlin-Suarez clubs and take axes to the rum and beer barrels. When Joe heard, he had Dion contact a guy in Valrico who made steel barrels and they put them in all the speaks, lifted the wooden casks into them, and waited to see who would come through their doors and take a swing now, snap their holy elbows off their holy fucking arms.

Joe was sitting in the front office of his cigar export company—a fully legitimate corporation; they lost a small fortune every year exporting superior tobacco to countries like Ireland and Sweden and France, where cigars had never really caught on—when Irv and his daughter walked through the front door.

Irv gave Joe a quick nod but wouldn’t meet his eyes. In the years since Joe had shown him those pictures of his daughter, he hadn’t met Joe’s eyes once and Joe estimated they’d passed each other on the street at least thirty times.

“My Loretta has some words for you.”

Joe looked up at the pretty young woman in her white dress and bright, wet eyes. “Yes, ma’am. Do take a seat if you’d like.”

“I’d prefer to stand, sir.”

“As you wish.”

“Mr. Coughlin,” she said, clasping her hands over her thighs, “my father said there was once a good man in you.”

“I wasn’t aware that man had departed.”

Loretta cleared her throat. “We know of your philanthropy. And that of the woman with whom you choose to cohabitate.”

“The woman with whom I choose to cohabitate,” Joe said, just to try it out.

“Yes, yes. We understand she is quite active in charitable work within the Ybor community and even in Greater Tampa.”

“She has a name.”

“But her good works are strictly temporal in nature. She refuses all religious affiliation and rebuffs all attempts to embrace the one true Lord.”

“She is named Graciela. And she is a Catholic,” Joe said.

“But until she publicly embraces the Lord’s hand moving through her work, she is—however well intentioned—aiding the devil.”

“Wow,” Joe said, “you completely lost me on that one.”

She said, “Luckily, you have not lost me. For all your good works, Mr. Coughlin, we both know they are unmitigated by your evil deeds and your distance from the Lord.”

“How so?”

“You profit from the illegal addictions of others. You profit off people’s weakness and their need for sloth and gluttony and libidinous behavior.” She gave him a sad and kindly smile. “But you can free yourself of that.”

Joe said, “I don’t want to.”

“Of course you do.”

“Miss Loretta,” Joe said, “you seem like a lovely person. And I understand Preacher Ingalls has seen his flock triple since you’ve begun preaching before them.”

Irv held up five fingers, his eyes on the floor.

“Oh,” Joe said, “I’m sorry. So attendance has quintupled. My.”

Loretta’s smile never left her face. It was soft and sad. It knew what you were going to say before you said it and it judged those words pointless before they left your mouth.

“Loretta,” Joe said, “I sell a product people enjoy so much that the Eighteenth Amendment will be overturned within the year.”

“That’s not true,” Irv said, his jaw set.

“Or,” Joe said, “it is. Either way, Prohibition is dead. They used it to keep the poor in line and it failed. They used it to make the middle class more industrious, and instead the middle class got curious. More booze was drunk in the last ten years than ever before, and that’s because people wanted it and didn’t want to be told they couldn’t have it.”

“But, Mr. Coughlin,” Loretta said reasonably, “the same could be said of fornication. People want it and they don’t want to be told they can’t have it.”

“Nor should they.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nor should they,” Joe said. “If people wish to fornicate, I see no pressing reason to stop them, Miss Figgis.”

“And if they wish to lie down with animals?”

“Do they?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do people wish to lie down with animals?”

“Some do. And their sickness will spread if you have your way.”

“I’m afraid I don’t see a correlation between drinking and fornication with animals.”

“But that isn’t to say there isn’t a correlation.”

Now she sat, hands still clasped in her lap.

“Sure it is,” Joe said. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“But that’s just your opinion.”

“As some would call your belief in God.”

“So you do not believe in God?”

“No, Loretta, I just don’t believe in your God.”

Joe looked over at Irv because he could feel the man seething, but, as always, Irv wouldn’t meet his eyes, just stared at his hands, which were clasped into fists.

“Well, he believes in you,” she said. “Mr. Coughlin, you will renounce your evil path. I just know it. I can see it in you. You will repent and become baptized in Jesus Christ. And you will make a great prophet. I see this as clearly as I see a sinless city on a hill, here in Tampa. And, yes, Mr. Coughlin, before you can make fun, I realize there are no hills in Tampa.”

“Well, none you’d notice, even if you were driving fast.”

She smiled a real smile, and it was the one he remembered from a few years ago, coming across her at the soda fountain or in the magazine section of Morin Drugstore.

Then it transformed into the sad, frozen one again, and her eyes brightened and she extended a gloved hand across the desk to him, and he shook it, thinking of the track scars it covered, as Loretta Figgis said, “I will one day spirit you off your path, Mr. Coughlin. Of that, you can be sure. I feel this to my bones.”

“Just because you feel it,” Joe said, “doesn’t make it so.”

“But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”

“I’ll grant you that.” Joe looked up at her. “Now why can’t you grant my opinions the same benefit of the doubt?”

Loretta’s sad smile brightened. “Because they’re wrong.”

Unfortunately for Joe, Esteban, and the Pescatore Family, as Loretta’s popularity rose, so did her legitimacy. After a few months, her proselytizing began to endanger the casino deal. Those who’d initially brought her up in public company had done so mostly to ridicule her or marvel at the circumstances that had brought her to her current state—all-American police chief’s daughter goes to Hollywood, comes back a raving loon with track marks in her arms that yokels mistake for stigmata. But the tone of the conversation began to shift not only as the roads clogged with both cars and foot traffic on nights it was rumored Loretta would appear at a revival, but also as regular townsfolk were exposed to her. Loretta, far from hiding from the public eye, engaged it. Not just in Hyde Park but also in West Tampa, Port of Tampa, and Ybor as well, where she liked to come to purchase coffee, her one vice.

She didn’t talk religion much during daylight hours. She was unfailingly polite, always quick to ask after someone’s health or the health of their loved ones. She never forgot a name. And she remained, even as the hard year of her “trials,” as she called them, had aged her, a strikingly beautiful woman. And beautiful in a conspicuously American way—full lips the same color as her burgundy hair, eyes honest and blue, skin as smooth and white as the sweet cream at the top of the morning milk bottle.

The fainting spells began to occur late in ’31 after the European banking crisis sucked the rest of the world into its vortex and killed all remaining hope for financial recovery. The spells came without warning or theatrics. She would be speaking of the ills of liquor or lust or (more and more lately) gambling—always in a quiet, slightly tremulous voice—and the visions God had sent her of a Tampa burned black by its own sins, a smoke-wisped wasteland of charred soil and smoldering piles of wood where homes had once stood, and she would remind them all of Lot’s wife and implore them not to look back, never to look back, but to look ahead to a shining city of white homes and white clothing and white people united in love of Christ and prayer and earnest desire to leave behind a world their children could be proud of. Somewhere in this sermon, her eyes would roll left and then right, her body swaying with them, and then she would drop. Sometimes she convulsed, sometimes a small amount of spittle leaked over her beautiful lips, but mostly she just appeared to be asleep. It was suggested (but only in the lowest circles) that part of the surge in her popularity stemmed from how lovely she looked when she lay prone on a stage, dressed in thin white crepe, thin enough so you could see her small, perfectly formed breasts and her slim, unblemished legs.

When Loretta lay on the stage like that, she was proof of God because only God could make something that beautiful, that fragile, and that powerful.

And so her swelling ranks of followers took her causes quite personally and none more so than the attempts of a local gangster to ravage their communities with the scourge of gambling. Soon the congressmen and the councilmen returned to Joe’s bagmen with “No,” or “We’ll need more time to consider all the variables,” though Joe noted the one thing they didn’t return with was his money.

The window was closing fast.

If Loretta Figgis were to meet with an untimely end—but in such a way as to be plausibly considered an “accident”—then after a respectful period of mourning, the casino idea would reach full flower. She loved Jesus so much, Joe told himself, he’d be doing her a service by bringing them together.

So he knew what he had to do, but he had yet to give the order.

He went to see her preach. He stopped shaving for a day and dressed the part of a man who sold farming equipment or possibly owned a feed store—clean dungarees, white shirt, string tie, a dark canvas sport coat and a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He had Sal drive him to the edge of the campgrounds the Reverend Ingalls was using that night, and he made his way down a thin dirt road between a small stand of pines until he reached the back of the crowd.

Along the shore of a pond, someone had built a small stage out of crate board, and Loretta stood on it with her father on the left and the reverend on the right, heads bowed. Loretta was speaking of a recent vision or dream (Joe came too late to hear which). With her back to the dark pond, in her white dress and white bonnet, she stood out against the black night like a midnight moon in a sky swept of stars. A family of three, she said—mother, father, tiny baby—had arrived in a strange land. The father, a businessman sent by his company to this strange land, had been instructed to wait for their driver inside the railway station and not venture outside. But it was hot inside the terminal and they had traveled far and wished to see their new land. They stepped outside and were instantly beset upon by a leopard as black as the inside of a coal bucket. And before the family had so much as its wits about them, the leopard had torn open their throats with its teeth. The man lay dying, watching the leopard slake itself on the blood of his wife, when another man appeared and shot that black leopard dead. This man told the dying businessman that he was the driver who had been hired by the company and all they’d had to do was wait for him.

But they hadn’t waited. Why hadn’t they waited?

And so it is with Jesus, Loretta said. Can you wait? Can you not give yourselves over to the earthly temptations that will tear your families asunder? Can you find a way to keep your loved ones safe from the beasts of prey until our Lord God and Savior returns?

“Or are you too weak?” Loretta asked.

“No!”

“Because I know that in my darkest hours, I’m too weak.”

“No!”

“I am,” Loretta cried. “But he gives me strength.” She pointed at the sky. “He fills my heart. But I need you to help me complete his wishes. I need your strength to continue preaching his word and doing his works and keeping the black leopards from eating our children and staining our hearts with endless sin. Will you help me?”

The crowd said Yes and Amen and Oh, yes. When Loretta closed her eyes and began to sway, the crowd opened its eyes and surged forward. When Loretta sighed, they moaned. When she fell to her knees, they gasped. And when she lay on her side, they exhaled as one. They reached for her without stepping any closer to the stage, as if some invisible barrier lay between them. They reached for something that wasn’t Loretta. Cried out to it. Promised all to it.

Loretta was its gateway, the portal by which they entered a world without sin, without dark, without fear. One where you were never alone. Because you had God. And you had Loretta.

“Tonight,” Dion said to him on the third-floor gallery of Joe’s home. “She’s gotta go.”

“You don’t think I’ve thought about it?” Joe said.

“Thinking about it ain’t the issue,” Dion said. “Acting on it is, boss.”

Joe pictured the Ritz, light pouring from its windows onto the dark sea, music flowing through its porticos and out across the Gulf as the dice rattled on the tables and the crowds cheered a winner, and he presided over all of it in tux and tails.

He asked himself, as he had so often over the past few weeks, What is one life?

People always died during building construction or laying steel tracks in the sun. They died from electrocution and other industrial accidents every single day, the world over. And for what? For the building of something good, something that would employ their fellow countrymen, put food on the table of the human race.

How would Loretta’s death be any different?

“It just would,” he said.

“What?” Dion peered at him.

Joe held up a hand in apology. “I can’t do it.”

“I can,” Dion said.

Joe said, “If you buy a ticket to the dance, then you know the consequences or you damn well should. But these people who sleep while the rest of us stay up? Work their jobs, mow their lawns? They didn’t buy a ticket. Which means they don’t suffer the same penalties for their mistakes.”

Dion sighed. “She’s jeopardizing the entire fucking deal.”

“I know that.” Joe was thankful for the sunset, for the darkness that had found them on the gallery. If Dion could see his eyes clearly, he’d know how shaky Joe was with the decision, how close he was to crossing the line and never looking back. Christ, she was one woman. “But my mind’s made up. No one touches a hair on her head.”

“You’ll regret this,” Dion said.

Joe said, “No shit.”

A week later, when John Ringling’s minions asked for a meeting, Joe knew it was over. If not completely, certainly tabled for a while. The entire country was going wet again, wet with abandon, wet with fervor and joy, but Tampa, under Loretta Figgis’s influence, was swinging the other way. If they couldn’t trump her when it came to the acceptance of booze, which was a signature away from being legalized, they were sunk when it came to gambling. John Ringling’s men told Joe and Esteban that their boss had decided to hold on to the Ritz a little longer, wait out the dip in the economy, and revisit his options at a later time.

The meeting was held in Sarasota. When Joe and Esteban left, they drove over to Longboat Key and stood looking at the gleaming Mediterranean Almost Was on the Gulf of Mexico.

“It would have been a great casino,” Joe said.

“You’ll have another chance. Things swing back around.”

Joe shook his head. “Not all things.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Quench Not the Spirit

The last time Loretta Figgis and Joe saw each other alive was early in 1933. It had rained heavily for a week. That morning, the first cloudless day in some time, the ground fog rose so thick off the streets of Ybor it was as if the earth had turned itself upside down. Joe walked the boardwalk along Palm Avenue, distracted, Sal Urso pacing him from the opposite boardwalk, and Lefty Downer pacing both of them in a car inching along the center. Joe had just confirmed a rumor that Maso was considering another trip down here, his second in a year, and the fact that Maso hadn’t told him himself didn’t sit right. On top of that, stories in this morning’s papers said that President-elect Roosevelt planned to sign the Cullen-Harrison Act as soon as someone put a pen in his hand, effectively ending Prohibition. Joe had known it could never last, but he still hadn’t been prepared somehow. And if he was unprepared, he could only imagine how poorly all the mugs in the bootleg boomtowns like KC, Cincy, Chicago, New York, and Detroit were going to take the news. He’d sat on his bed this morning and tried to read the article so he could identify the exact week or month Roosevelt was going to wield that most popular of pens, but he was distracted because Graciela was puking up last night’s paella to beat the band. Normally, she had a cast-iron stomach, but lately the stress of running three shelters and eight different fund-raising groups was shredding her digestive system.

“Joseph.” She stood in the doorway and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We may need to face something.”

“What’s that, doll?”

“I think I’m with child.”

For a few moments Joe thought she’d smuggled one of the street urchins back from the shelter with her. He actually glanced past her left hip before it dawned on him.

“You’re…?”

She smiled. “Pregnant.”

He got off the bed and stood before her and wasn’t sure if he should touch her because he was afraid she’d break.

She put her arms around his neck. “It’s okay. You’re going to be a father.” She kissed him, her hands finding the back of his head where his scalp tingled. Actually everything tingled, as if he’d woken to find himself encased in fresh skin.

“Say something.” She looked at him, curious.

“Thanks,” he said because nothing else occurred to him.

“Thanks?” She laughed and kissed him again, mashing his lips with her own. “Thanks?”

“You’re going to be an amazing mother.”

She pressed her forehead to his. “And you’ll be a great father.”

If I live, he thought.

And knew she was thinking it too.

So he was a little off his feed that morning when he entered Nino’s Coffee Shop without looking through the windows first.

There were only three tables in the coffee shop, a crime for a place that served coffee this good, and two of them were occupied by Klan. Not that an outsider would have recognized them as such, but Joe had no trouble seeing hoods even if they weren’t wearing them—Clement Dover and Drew Altman and Brewster Engals, at one table, the older, smart guard; at the other, Julius Stanton, Haley Lewis, Carl Joe Crewson, and Charlie Bailey, morons all, more likely to set themselves on fire than any cross they were trying to burn. But, like a lot of dumb people who didn’t have the sense to know how dumb they were, mean and merciless.

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, Joe knew it wasn’t an ambush. He could see in their eyes that they hadn’t expected to see him. They’d just come here for the coffee, maybe to intimidate the owners into paying some protection. Sal was right outside, but that wasn’t the same thing as inside. Joe pushed his suit jacket back and left his hand there, one inch from his gun as he looked at Engals, the leader of this particular pack, a fireman with Engine 9 at Lutz Junction.

Engals nodded, a small smile growing on his lips, and he flicked his eyes at something behind Joe, at the third table by the window. Joe glanced over, saw Loretta Figgis sitting there, watching the whole thing happen. Joe removed his hand from his hip, let his suit jacket fall free. No one was getting into a gun battle with the Madonna of Tampa Bay sitting five feet away.

Joe nodded back and Engals said, “Another time then.”

Joe tipped his hat and turned to exit when Loretta said, “Mr. Coughlin, sit. Please.”

Joe said, “No, no, Miss Loretta. You look like you’re having a peaceful morning without me disrupting it.”

“I insist,” she said as Carmen Arenas, the owner’s wife, came to the table.

Joe shrugged and removed his hat. “The usual, Carmen.”

“Yes, Mr. Coughlin. Miss Figgis?”

“I will have another, yes.”

Joe sat and placed his hat on his knee.

“Do those gentlemen not like you?” Loretta asked.

Joe noticed she wasn’t wearing white today. Her dress was more a light peach. In most people, you wouldn’t notice, but pure white had become so identified with Loretta Figgis that seeing her in anything else was a bit like seeing her naked.

“They aren’t going to invite me for Sunday dinner anytime soon,” Joe told her.

“Why?” She leaned into the table as Carmen brought their coffees.

“I lie down with mud people, work with mud people, fraternize with mud people.” He looked over his shoulder. “I leave anything out, Engals?”

“’Sides you killed four of our number?”

Joe nodded his thanks and turned back to Loretta. “Oh, and they think I killed four friends of theirs.”

“Did you?”

“You’re not wearing white,” he said.

“It’s almost white,” she said.

“How will that go over with your”—he searched for the word but couldn’t come up with anything better than—“followers?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Coughlin,” she said, and there was no false brightness in her voice, no desperate serenity in her eyes.

The Klavern boys got up from their tables and filed past, each of them managing either to bump Joe’s chair or hit his foot with his own.

“Be seeing you,” Dover said to him and then tipped his hat to Loretta. “Ma’am.”

They filed out and then it was just Joe and Loretta and the sound of last night’s rain ticking off the balcony gutter and down onto the boardwalk. Joe studied Loretta as he sipped his coffee. She’d lost the sharp light that had lived in her eyes since the day she walked back out of her father’s house two years ago, having traded the black mourning dress of her death for the white dress of her rebirth.

“Why does my father hate you so much?”

“I’m a criminal. He used to be chief of police.”

“But he liked you then. He even pointed you out to me once when I was still in high school and said, ‘That’s the mayor of Ybor. He keeps the peace.’ ”

“He said that, huh?”

“He did.”

Joe drank some more coffee. “Those were more innocent days, I guess.”

She sipped her own coffee. “So what did you do to deserve his rancor?”

Joe shook his head.

Now it was her turn to study him for a long, uncomfortable minute. He held her eyes as she searched his. Searched until the realization dawned.

“You were how he knew where to find me.”

Joe said nothing, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

“It was you.” She nodded and looked down at the table. “What did you have?”

She stared at him for another uncomfortable period of time before he answered.

“Photographs.”

“And you showed them to him.”

“I showed him two.”

“How many did you have?”

“Dozens.”

She looked down at the table again, turned her cup on its saucer. “We’re all going to hell.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?” She twirled the coffee cup again. “Do you know what truth I’ve learned these last two years of preaching and fainting and thrusting my soul out to God?”

He shook his head.

“That this is heaven.” She indicated the street, the roof above their heads. “We’re in it now.”

“How come it feels so much like hell?”

“Because we fucked it all up.” Her sweet and serene smile returned. “This is paradise. And it’s lost.”

Joe was surprised by the depths of his own mourning for her loss of belief. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he had hoped that if anyone did have a direct line to the Almighty, it was Loretta.

“When you started,” he asked her, “you did believe, though, didn’t you?”

She stared back at him with clear eyes. “With such a certainty, it just had to be divinely inspired. It felt like my blood had been replaced with fire. Not burning fire, just a constant warmth that never ebbed. I’d felt that way as a child, I think. I felt safe and loved and so sure this is how life would always be. I would always have my daddy and my mommy and the world would look just like Tampa and everyone would know my name and wish good things for me. But I grew up, and I went west. And when all those beliefs turned out to be lies? When I realized I wasn’t special, I wasn’t safe?” She turned her arms to show him the track marks. “I took the news poorly.”

“But after you came back here, after your…”

“Trials?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I came back and my father chased my mother from the house and beat the devil from me and taught me to pray again on my knees and without wishing for personal gain. To pray as a supplicant. To pray as a sinner. And the flame returned. On my knees, by the bed I’d slept in as a child. I’d been on my knees all day. I’d been awake most of the week. And the flame found my blood, found my heart, and I felt certain again. Do you know how much I’d missed it? I’d missed it more than any drug, any love, any food, maybe more even than the God who supposedly bequeathed it to me. Certainty, Mr. Coughlin. Certainty. It’s the most gorgeous lie of them all.”

Neither said anything for a bit, long enough for Carmen to return with fresh cups of coffee to replace the ones they’d emptied.

“My mother passed away last week. Did you know that?”

“I hadn’t heard, Loretta, I’m sorry.”

She waved off his apology and drank some coffee. “My father’s beliefs and my beliefs drove her from our home. She would say at him, ‘You don’t love God. You love the idea of being special to him. You want to believe he sees you.’ When I learned of her passing, I understood what she meant. I took no comfort in God. I don’t know God. I just wanted my mommy back.” She nodded several times to herself.

A couple walked into the shop, the bell tinkling over the door as Carmen came out from behind the counter to seat them.

“I don’t know if there’s a God.” She fingered her coffee cup handle. “I certainly hope there is. And I hope he is kind. Wouldn’t that be swell, Mr. Coughlin?”

“It would,” Joe said.

“I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe—or, I want to believe—he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”

He looked at her very carefully. “Or those we commit against ourselves in despair.”

“Oh,” she said brightly, “I’m not in despair. Are you?”

He shook his head. “Not even close.”

“What’s your secret?”

He chuckled. “This is a little intimate for coffee shop chat.”

“I want to know. You seem…” She looked around the café, and for a fleeting moment a wild abandonment slid through her eyes. “You seem whole.”

He smiled and shook his head repeatedly.

“You do,” she said.

“No.”

“You do. What’s the secret?”

He fingered his saucer for a moment, said nothing.

“Come now, Mr. Cough—”

“Her.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Her,” Joe said. “Graciela. My wife.” He looked across the table at her. “I hope there’s a God too. I so deeply hope that. But if there isn’t? Then Graciela is enough.”

“But what if you lose her?”

“I don’t intend to lose her.”

“But what if you do?” She leaned into the table.

“Then I would be all head, no heart.”

They sat in silence. Carmen came over and warmed their cups and Joe added a bit more sugar to his and looked at Loretta and felt the most powerful and inexplicable urge to hug her to him and tell her it would be okay.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You’re a pillar of this city. Hell, you came up against me at the height of my power and you won. The Klan couldn’t do that. The law couldn’t. But you did.”

“I didn’t get rid of alcohol.”

“But you killed gambling. And until you came along? It was a lock.”

She smiled, then covered the smile with her hands. “I did do that, didn’t I?”

Joe smiled with her. “Yes, you did. You’ve got thousands of people who will follow you right off a cliff, Loretta.”

She laughed a wet laugh and looked up at the tin ceiling. “I don’t want anyone to follow me anywhere.”

“Have you told them that?”

“He doesn’t listen.”

“Irv?”

She nodded.

“Give him time.”

“He used to love my mother so much I remember him trembling sometimes when he got too close to her. Because he wanted to touch her so badly? But he couldn’t because we children were around and it wasn’t proper. Now she’s died, and he didn’t even go to her funeral. Because the God he imagines would have disapproved. The God he imagines doesn’t share. My father sits in his chair every night, reading his Bible, blind with rage because men were allowed to touch his daughter the way he used to touch his wife. And worse.” She leaned into the table and rubbed at a stray grain of sugar with her index finger. “He walks around the house in the dark whispering one word over and over.”

“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.

Within a few weeks, Loretta went back to wearing white. Her preaching continued to pack them in. She’d added a few new wrinkles, though—tricks, some people scoffed—speaking 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.

President 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 Joe—pretty 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 sons—one’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 will—?”

“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. Then—”

“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 vivid—mutilating 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 man—”

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.

“—were 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 to—”

“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.”