Live by Night

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Haircut

“You’re sure it’s her?” Dion said the next morning in Joe’s office.

From his inside pocket, Joe removed the photograph Esteban had pulled back out of the frame last night. He placed it on the desk in front of Dion. “You tell me.”

Dion’s eyes drifted and then locked and finally widened. “Oh, yeah, that’s her all right.” He looked sideways at Joe. “You tell Graciela?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You tell your women everything?”

“I don’t tell ’em shit, but you’re more of a nance than me. And she’s carrying your child.”

“That’s true.” He looked up at the copper ceiling. “I didn’t tell her yet because I don’t know how.”

“It’s easy,” Dion said. “You just say ‘Honey, sweetie, dearest, you remember that filly I was sweet on before you? One I told you went tits-up? Well, she’s alive and living in your hometown and still quite the dish. Speaking of dishes, what’s for dinner?’ ”

Sal, standing by the door, looked down to hide a chuckle.

“You enjoying yourself?” Joe asked Dion.

“Time of my life,” Dion said, his girth shaking the chair.

“D,” Joe said, “we’re talking about six years of rage here, six years of…” Joe threw his hands up at it, unable to put it into words. “I survived Charlestown because of that rage, I hung Maso off a fucking roof because of it, chased Albert White out of Tampa, hell, I—”

“Built an empire because of it.”

“Yeah.”

“So when you see her?” Dion said. “Tell her thanks from me.”

Joe’s mouth was open, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Look,” Dion said, “I never liked the cooze. You know that. But she sure found a way to inspire you, boss. Reason I ask if you told Graciela is because I do like her. I like her a lot.”

“I like her a lot too,” Sal said, and they both looked over at him. He held up his right hand, the Thompson in his left. “Sorry.”

“We talk a certain way,” Dion said to him, “because we used to beat each other up when we were kids. To you, he’s always the boss.”

“Won’t happen again.”

Dion turned back to Joe.

“We didn’t beat each other up when we were kids,” Joe said.

“Sure we did.”

“No,” Joe said. “You beat the shit out of me.”

“You hit me with a brick.”

“So you’d stop beating the shit out of me.”

“Oh.” Dion was quiet for a moment. “I had a point.”

“When?”

“When I came through the door. Oh, we gotta talk about Maso’s visit. And you hear about Irv Figgis?”

“I heard about Loretta, yeah.”

Dion shook his head. “We all heard about Loretta. But last night? Irv walked into Arturo’s place? Apparently that’s where Loretta scored her last vial of junk the night before last?”

“Okay…”

“Yeah, well, Irv beat Arturo near to death.”

“No.”

Dion nodded. “Kept saying ‘Repent, repent,’ and just driving his fists down like fucking pistons. Arturo could lose an eye.”

“Shit. And Irv?”

Dion whirled his index finger beside his temple. “They got him on a sixty-day observation bit at the bughouse in Temple Terrace.”

“Christ,” Joe said, “what did we do to these people?”

Dion’s face darkened to scarlet. He turned and pointed at Sal Urso. “You never fucking saw this, get me?”

Sal said, “Saw what?” and Dion slapped Joe across the face.

Slapped him so hard Joe hit the desk. He bounced off it and came back with his .32 already pointed into the folds under Dion’s chin.

Dion said, “I’m not watching you walk into another life-or-death meeting knowing you’re half-hoping to die over something you had nothing to do with. You want to shoot me here and now?” He flung his arms wide. “Pull the fucking trigger.”

“Don’t think I will?”

“I don’t care if you do,” Dion said. “Because I’m not going to watch you try to kill yourself a second time. You’re my brother. You get me, you stupid fucking mick? You. More than Seppi or Paolo, God rest ’em. You. And I can’t lose another fucking brother. Can’t do it.”

Dion grabbed Joe’s wrist, curled his finger over Joe’s trigger finger, and dug the gun even deeper into the folds of his neck. He closed his eyes and tightened his lips against his teeth.

“By the way,” he said, “when you going over there?”

“Where?”

“Cuba.”

“Who said I’m going over there?”

Dion frowned. “You just found out this dead girl you used to be bugs for is alive and breathing about three hundred miles south of here, and you’re going to just sit with that information?”

Joe removed his gun and placed it back in its holster. He noticed Sal looking white as ash and moist as a hot towel. “I’m going as soon as this meeting with Maso’s over. You know how the old man can talk.”

“Which is what I come here to discuss.” Dion opened the moleskin notebook he carried with him everywhere, thumbed the pages. “There’s a lot of things I don’t like about this.”

“Such as?”

“Him and his guys took over half a train to come down here. That’s an awful big entourage.”

“He’s old—he got the nurse with him everywhere, maybe a doctor, and he keeps four gunners around him at all times.”

Dion nodded. “Well, he’s got at least twenty guys with him. That’s not twenty nurses. He took over the Romero Hotel on Eighth. The whole hotel. Why?”

“Security.”

“But he always stays at the Tampa Bay Hotel. Just takes over a floor. His security’s guaranteed that way. Why commandeer a whole hotel in the middle of Ybor?”

“I think he’s getting more paranoid,” Joe said.

He wondered what he’d say to her when he saw her. Remember me?

Or was that too corny?

“Boss,” Dion said, “listen to me for a second. He didn’t take the Seaboard out here direct. He started on the Illinois Central. He stopped in Detroit, KC, Cincinnati, and Chicago.”

“Right. Where all his whiskey partners are.”

“It’s also where all the bosses are. All the ones who matter outside of New York and Providence, and guess where he went two weeks ago?”

Joe looked across the desk at his friend. “New York and Providence.”

“Yup.”

“So you think what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think he’s barnstorming the country asking permission to take us out?”

“Maybe.”

Joe shook his head. “Makes no sense, D. In five years, we’ve quadrupled the profits of this organization. This was a fucking cow town when we got here. Last year we netted—what?—eleven million from rum alone?”

“Eleven-five,” Dion said. “And we’ve more than quadrupled.”

“So why fuck up a good thing? I don’t buy Maso’s ‘Joseph, you’re like a son to me’ bullshit any more than you do. But he respects the numbers. And our numbers are first-rate.”

Dion nodded. “I agree it makes no sense to take us out. But I don’t like these signs. I don’t like how they make my stomach feel.”

“That’s the paella you ate last night.”

Dion gave him a weak smile. “Sure. Maybe that’s it.”

Joe stood. He parted the blinds and looked out on the factory floor. Dion was worried, but Dion was paid to worry. So he was doing his job. In the end, Joe knew, everyone in this business did what they did to make the most money they could make. Simple as that. And Joe made money. Bags and bags of it that went up the seaboard with the bottles of rum and filled the safe in Maso’s mansion in Nahant. Every year Joe made more than he had the year before. Maso was ruthless and he’d grown a bit less predictable as his health declined. But he was, above all else, greedy. And Joe fed that greed. He kept its stomach warm and full. There was no logical reason Maso would risk going hungry again to replace Joe. And why replace Joe? He’d committed no transgressions. He didn’t skim off the top. He posed no threat to Maso’s power.

Joe turned from the window. “Do whatever you have to do to guarantee my safety at that meeting.”

“I can’t guarantee your safety at the meeting,” Dion said. “That’s my problem with it. He’s got you walking into a building where he’s bought up every room. They’re probably sweeping the place right now, so I can’t get any soldiers in there, I can’t tuck any weapons anywhere, nothing. You’re going in blind. And we’ll be on the outside just as blind. If they decide you’re not walking out of that building?” Dion tapped the desktop with his index finger several times. “Then you are not walking out of that building.”

Joe considered his friend for a long time. “What’s gotten into you?”

“A feeling.”

“A feeling ain’t a fact,” Joe said. “And the facts are there’s no percentage in killing me. It benefits no one.”

“As far as you know.”

The Romero Hotel was a ten-story redbrick building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. It catered to commercial travelers who weren’t quite important enough for their companies to put them up at the Tampa Hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotel—every room had a toilet and washbasin, and the sheets were changed every second day; room service was available in the morning and on Friday and Saturday evenings—but it wasn’t palatial by any means.

Joe, Sal, and Lefty were met at the front door by Adamo and Gino Valocco, brothers from Calabria. Joe had known Gino in Charlestown Pen’, and they chatted as they walked through the lobby.

“Where you living now?” Joe said.

“Salem,” Gino said. “It’s not so bad.”

“You settled down?”

Gino nodded. “Found a nice Italian girl. Two kids now.”

“Two?” Joe said. “You work fast.”

“I like a big family. You?”

Joe wasn’t telling a fucking gun monkey, pleasant as he could be to chat with, about his impending fatherhood. “Still thinking about it.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Gino said. “You need the energy for when they’re young.”

It was one of the things about the business Joe always found charming and absurd at the same time—five men walking to an elevator, four of them carrying machine guns, all of them packing handguns, two of them asking each other about the wife and kids.

At the elevator, Joe kept Gino talking about his kids a bit more as he tried to catch a whiff of ambush odor. Once they climbed in that elevator, any illusions they had of an exit route ended.

But that’s all they were—illusions. The moment they’d walked through the front door, they’d given up their freedom. Given up their lives if Maso, for some demented motive Joe couldn’t fathom, wanted to end them. The elevator was just the smaller box within the bigger box. But the fact that they were in a box was impossible to argue.

Maybe Dion was right.

And maybe Dion was wrong.

Only one way to find out.

They left the Valocco brothers and got in the elevator. The operator was Ilario Nobile, permanently gaunt and yellowed by hep’, but a magician with a gun. They said he could put a rifle shot through a flea’s ass during a solar eclipse and could sign his name on a windowsill with a Thompson and not chip a pane of glass.

As they rode up to the top floor, Joe chatted with Ilario as easily as he had with Gino Valocco. In Ilario’s case, the trick was to talk about the man’s dogs. He bred beagles out of his home in Revere and was known to produce dogs of gentle temperament and the softest ears.

But as they rose in the car, Joe wondered again if maybe Dion had been onto something. The Valocco brothers and Ilario Nobile were all known gunners. They weren’t muscle and they weren’t brains. They were killers.

In the tenth-floor hallway, though, the only other person waiting for them was Fausto Scarfone, another artisan with a weapon to be sure, but it was him and only him, which left an even match to wait in the corridor—two of Maso’s guys, two of Joe’s.

Maso himself opened the doors to the Gasparilla Suite, the nicest suite in the hotel. He hugged Joe and took both sides of his face in his hands when he kissed his forehead. He hugged him again and patted him hard on the back.

“How are you, my son?”

“I’m very good, Mr. Pescatore. Thanks for asking.”

“Fausto, see if his men need anything.”

“Take their rods, Mr. Pescatore?”

Maso frowned. “Of course not. You gentlemen make yourselves comfortable. We shouldn’t be too long.” Maso pointed at Fausto. “Anyone wants a sandwich or something, you call room service. Anything these boys want.”

He led Joe into the suite and closed the doors behind them. One set of windows looked out on an alley and the yellow brick building next door, a piano manufacturer who’d gone belly-up in ’29. All that remained was his name, HORACE R. PORTER, fading on the brick, and a bunch of boarded-up windows. The other windows, though, looked out on nothing that would remind guests of the Depression. They overlooked Ybor and the channels that led out to Hillsborough Bay.

In the center of the living area four armchairs were arranged around an oak coffee table. A sterling silver coffeepot and matching creamer and sugar bowl sat in the center. So did a bottle of anisette and three small glasses of it, already poured. Maso’s middle son, Santo, sat waiting for them, looking up at Joe as he poured himself a cup of coffee and placed the cup down beside an orange.

Santo Pescatore was thirty-one and everyone called him Digger, though no one could remember why, not even Santo himself.

“You remember Joe, Santo.”

“I dunno. Maybe.” He half rose from his chair and gave Joe a limp, damp handshake. “Call me Digger.”

“Good to see you again.” Joe took a seat across from him, and Maso came around, took the seat beside his son.

Digger peeled the orange, tossing the peels onto the coffee table. He wore a permanent scowl of confused suspicion on his long face, like he’d just heard a joke he didn’t get. He had curly dark hair that was thinning up front, a fleshy chin and neck, and his father’s eyes, dark and small as sharpened pencil points. There was something dulled about him, though. He didn’t have his father’s charm or cunning because he’d never needed to.

Maso poured Joe a cup of coffee and handed it across the table. “How’ve you been?”

“Very good, sir. You?”

Maso tipped a hand back and forth. “Good days and bad.”

“I hope more good than bad.”

Maso raised a glass of the anisette to that. “So far, so far. Salud.”

Joe raised a glass. “Salud.”

Maso and Joe drank. Digger popped an orange slice in his mouth and chewed with his mouth open.

Joe was reminded, not for the first time, that for such a violent business, it was filled with a surprising number of regular guys—men who loved their wives, who took their children on Saturday-afternoon outings, men who worked on their automobiles and told jokes at the neighborhood lunch counter and worried what their mothers thought of them and went to church to ask God’s forgiveness for all the terrible things they had to render unto Caesar in order to put food on the table.

But it was also a business that was populated by an equal number of pigs. Vicious oafs whose primary talent was that they felt no more for their fellow man than they did for a fly sputtering on the windowsill at summer’s end.

Digger Pescatore was one of the latter. And like so many of the breed Joe had come across, he was the son of a founding father of this thing they all found themselves entwined with, grafted to, subjects of.

Over the years Joe had met all three of Maso’s sons. He’d met Tim Hickey’s only boy, Buddy. He’d met the sons of Cianci in Miami, Barrone in Chicago, and DiGiacomo in New Orleans. The fathers were fearsomely self-made creatures, one and all. Men of iron will and some vision and not even a passing acquaintance with sympathy. But men, unquestionably men.

And every one of their sons, Joe thought as the sound of Digger’s chewing filled the room, was a fucking embarrassment to the human race.

As Digger ate his orange and then a second one, Maso and Joe discussed Maso’s trip down, the heat, Graciela, and the baby on the way.

After those topics had been exhausted, Maso produced a newspaper that had been tucked into the seat beside him. He took the bottle around the table and sat beside Joe. He poured two more drinks and opened the Tampa Tribune. Loretta Figgis’s face stared back at them under the headline:

He said to Joe, “This the filly who caused us all the trouble on the casino?”

“That’s her.”

“Why didn’t you clip her then?”

“Would’ve been too much blowback. The whole state was watching.”

Maso tore an orange slice free of the peel. “That’s true but that’s not why.”

“No?”

Maso shook his head. “Why didn’t you kill the ’shiner like I told you back in ’32?”

“Turner John?”

Maso nodded.

“Because we came to an accommodation.”

Maso shook his head. “You weren’t ordered to accommodate. You were ordered to kill the son of a bitch. And the reason you didn’t was the same reason you didn’t kill this puttana pazzo—because you’re not a killer, Joseph. Which is a problem.”

“It is? Since when?”

“Since now. You’re not a gangster.”

“Trying to hurt my feelings, Maso?”

“You’re an outlaw, a bandit in a suit. And now I hear you’re thinking of going legitimate?”

“Thinking about it.”

“So you won’t mind if I replace you down here?”

Joe smiled for some reason. Chuckled. He found his cigarettes and lit one.

“When I got here, Maso? This outfit grossed a million a year.”

“I know.”

“Since I got here? We’ve averaged almost eleven million.”

“Mostly because of the rum, though. Those days are ending. You’ve neglected the girls and the narcotics.”

“Bullshit,” Joe said.

“Excuse me?”

“I concentrated on the rum because, yeah, it was most profitable. But our narcotic sales are up sixty-five percent. As for the girls, we added four houses in my time here.”

“But you could have added more. And the whores claim they’re rarely beaten.”

Joe found himself looking down at the table into Loretta’s face, then looking up, then looking back down again. It was his turn to exhale a loud breath. “Maso, I—”

“Mr. Pescatore,” Maso said.

Joe said nothing.

“Joseph,” Maso said, “our friend Charlie wants to make some changes to the way we run our thing.”

“Our friend Charlie” was Lucky Luciano out of New York. King, essentially. Emperor for Life.

“What changes?”

“Considering Lucky’s right hand is a kike, the changes are a bit ironic, even unfair. I won’t lie to you.”

Joe gave Maso a tight smile and waited for the old man to get to it.

“Charlie wants Italians, and only Italians, in the top slots.”

Maso wasn’t kidding—it was the height of irony. Everyone knew that no matter how smart Lucky was—and he was smart as hell—he was nothing without Meyer Lansky. Lansky, a Jew from the Lower East Side, had done more than anyone in this thing of theirs to turn a collection of mom-and-pop shops into a corporation.

The thing was, though, Joe had no desire to reach the top. He was happy with his small local operation.

He said as much now to Maso.

“You’re far too modest,” Maso said.

“I’m not. I run Ybor. And the rum, yeah, but that’s over, like you said.”

“You run a lot more than Ybor and a lot more than Tampa, Joseph. Everyone knows that. You run the Gulf Coast from here to Biloxi. You run the out routes from here to Jacksonville and half the ones that head north. I’ve been through the books. You’ve made us a force down here.”

Instead of saying And this is how you thank me? Joe said, “So if I can’t be in charge because Charlie says ‘No Irish need apply,’ what can I be?”

“What I tell you to.” This from Digger, finished with his second orange, wiping his sticky palms on the sides of the armchair.

Maso gave Joe a don’t-mind-him look and said, “Consigliere. You stay with Digger and teach him the ropes, introduce him to people around town, maybe teach him how to golf or fish.”

Digger fixed Joe in his tiny eyes. “I know how to shave and tie my shoes.”

Joe wanted to say, But you have to think about it, don’t you?

Maso patted Joe’s knee once. “You’ll have to take a little haircut, financially speaking. But don’t worry, we’re going to muscle the port this summer, take the whole fucking thing over, and there’ll be plenty of work, I promise.”

Joe nodded. “What kind of haircut?”

Maso said, “Digger takes over your cut. You assemble a crew and keep whatever you make, less tribute.”

Joe looked at the windows. He looked out at the ones overlooking the alley for a moment. Then the ones overlooking the bay. He counted down slowly from ten. “You’re demoting me to crew boss?”

Maso patted his knee again. “It’s a realignment, Joseph. On Charlie Luciano’s orders.”

“Charlie said, ‘Replace Joe Coughlin in Tampa.’ ”

“Charlie said, ‘No non-Italians at the top.’ ” Maso’s voice was still smooth, kindly even, but Joe could hear a bit of frustration creeping in.

Joe took a moment to keep his own voice in check because he knew how fast Maso could drop the courtly old gentleman mask and reveal the savage cannibal behind it.

“Maso, I think Digger wearing the crown is a great idea. The two of us together? We’ll take over the state, take over Cuba while we’re at it. I have the connections to do that. But my cut needs to stay close to what it is now. I step down to crew boss? I’ll make maybe a tenth of what I’m making now. And I gotta make my monthly nut on—what?—shaking down longshoremen unions and cigar factory owners? There’s no power there.”

“Maybe that’s the point.” Digger smiled for the first time, a piece of orange stuck in his upper teeth. “You ever think of that, smart guy?”

Joe looked at Maso.

Maso stared back at him.

Joe said, “I built this.”

Maso nodded.

Joe said, “I pulled ten-eleven times out of this city what Lou Ormino was fucking making for you.”

“Because I let you,” Maso said.

“Because you needed me.”

“Hey, smart guy,” Digger said, “nobody needs you.”

Maso patted the air between him and his son, the kind of calming gesture you used on a dog. Digger sat back in his chair, and Maso turned to Joe. “We could use you, Joseph. We could. But I am sensing a lack of gratitude.”

“So am I.”

This time Maso’s hand settled on his knee and squeezed. “You work for me. Not for yourself, not for the spics or the niggers you surround yourself with. If I tell you to go clean the shit out of my toilet, guess what you’re going to do?” He smiled, his voice as soft as ever. “I’ll kill your cunt girlfriend and burn your house to embers if I feel like it. You know this, Joseph. Your eyes got a little big for your head down here, that’s all. I’ve seen it happen before.” He raised the hand from Joe’s knee and patted Joe’s face with it. “So, do you want to be a crew boss? Or do you want to clean the shit out of my toilets on diarrhea day? I’m accepting applications for both.”

If Joe played ball, he’d have a few days’ head start to talk to all his contacts, marshal his forces, and align the chess pieces correctly. While Maso and his guns were back on the train heading north, Joe would fly up to New York, talk to Luciano directly, put a balance sheet on his desk and show him what Joe would make him versus what a retard like Digger Pescatore would lose him. There was an excellent chance Lucky would see the light and they could move past this with minimal bloodshed.

“Crew boss,” Joe said.

“Ah,” Maso said with a broad smile, “my boy.” He pinched Joe’s cheeks. “My boy.”

When Maso got out of his chair, Joe did too. They shook hands. They hugged. Maso kissed both his cheeks in the same spots where he’d pinched them.

Joe shook hands with Digger and told him how much he looked forward to working with him.

“For,” Digger reminded him.

“Right,” Joe said. “For you.”

He headed for the door.

“Dinner tonight?” Maso said.

Joe stopped at the door. “Sure. Tropicale at nine sound good?”

“Sounds great.”

“Okay. I’ll get us the best table.”

“Wonderful,” Maso said. “And make sure he’s dead by then.”

“What?” Joe took his hand off the knob. “Who?”

“Your friend.” Maso poured himself a cup of coffee. “The large one.”

“Dion?”

Maso nodded.

“He hasn’t done anything,” Joe said.

Maso looked up at him.

“What am I missing?” Joe said. “He’s been a great earner and a great gun.”

“He’s a rat,” Maso said. “Six years ago, he ratted on you. Means six minutes from now, six days, six months, he’ll do it again. I can’t have a rat working for my son.”

“No,” Joe said.

“No?”

“No, he didn’t sell me out. That was his brother. I told you.”

“I know what you told me, Joseph. I also know you lied. Now, I allow you one lie.” He held up his index finger while he added cream to his coffee. “You’ve had yours. Kill that hunk of shit before dinner.”

“Maso,” Joe said. “Listen. It was his brother. I know it for a fact.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“You’re not lying to me?”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“Because you know what it means if you are.”

Jesus, Joe thought, you came down here to steal my operation for your useless fucking son. Just steal it already.

“I know what it means,” Joe said.

“You’re sticking to your story.” Maso dropped a cube of sugar into his cup.

“I’m sticking to it because it’s not a story. It’s the truth.”

“The whole truth and nothing but, uh?”

Joe nodded. “The whole truth and nothing but.”

Maso shook his head slowly, sadly, and the door behind Joe opened and Albert White walked into the room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR How You Meet Your End

The first thing Joe noticed about Albert White was how much he’d aged in three years. Gone were the white- and cream-colored suits and fifty-dollar spats. His shoes were one step above the cardboard worn by the people who lived in the streets and the tents all over the country now. The lapels of his brown suit were frayed and the elbows thin. His haircut was the kind you got at home from a distracted wife or daughter.

The second thing Joe noticed was that he held Sal Urso’s Thompson in his right hand. Joe knew it was Sal’s because of the markings along the breech. Sal had a habit of rubbing the breech with his left hand when he was sitting with the Thompson on his lap. He still wore his wedding ring, even though his wife had caught the typhus in ’23, not long before he came to work for Lou Ormino in Tampa. When Sal rubbed the Thompson, the ring scratched the metal. Now, after years of cradling that gun, there was almost no bluing left.

Albert raised it to his shoulder as he crossed to Joe. He appraised Joe’s three-piece suit.

“Anderson and Sheppard?” he asked.

Joe said, “H. Huntsman.”

Albert nodded. He opened the left side of his own jacket so Joe could admire the label—Kresge’s. “My fortunes have changed a bit since the last time I was here.”

Joe said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“I’m back in Boston. I was close to getting a tin cup, you know? Selling fucking pencils, Joe. But then I run into Beppe Nunnaro in this little basement place in the North End. Beppe and I used to be friends. A long time ago, before all this unfortunate series of misunderstandings with Mr. Pescatore. And Beppe and me, Joe, we got to talking. Your name didn’t come up immediately but Dion’s did. See, Beppe used to be a newsie with Dion and Dion’s dumb brother, Paolo. Did you know that?”

Joe nodded.

“So you can probably see where this is going. Beppe said he’d known Paolo most of his life and had a hard time believing Paolo would double-cross anyone, never mind his own brother and a police captain’s son, on a bank job.” Albert slung his arm around Joe’s neck. “To which I said, ‘Paolo didn’t double-cross anyone. Dion did. I know because I’m the guy he ratted to.’ ” Albert walked toward the window that faced the alley and Horace Porter’s defunct piano warehouse. Joe had no choice but to walk with him. “At this point, Beppe thought it might be a good idea if I talked to Mr. Pescatore.” They stopped at the window. “Which leads us to now. Raise your hands.”

Joe did and Albert frisked him as Maso and Digger wandered over and stood by the windows. He removed the Savage .32 from behind Joe’s back and the derringer single-shot above his right ankle and the switchblade in his left shoe.

“Anything else?” Albert said.

“Usually that suffices,” Joe said.

“Cracking wise to the end.” Albert put his arm around Joe’s shoulders.

Maso said, “The thing about Mr. White, Joe, that you should probably have grasped—”

“And what’s that, Maso?”

“It’s that he knows Tampa.” Maso raised a thick eyebrow at Joe.

“Which makes you a lot less ‘needed,’ ” Digger said. “Dumb fuck.”

“The language,” Maso said. “Is that really necessary?”

They all turned back to the window, like kids waiting for the curtain to part at a puppet show.

Albert raised the tommy gun in front of their faces. “Nice piece. I understand you know the owner.”

“I do.” Joe heard the sadness in his own voice. “I do.”

They stood facing the window for about a minute before Joe heard the scream and the shadow plummeted down the yellow brick wall across from him. Sal’s face flew past the window, his arms flapping wildly at the air. And then he stopped falling. His head snapped up straight and his feet jerked up toward his chin as the noose snapped his neck. The body swung into the building twice and then twirled on the rope. The idea, Joe assumed, had been for Sal to end up hanging directly in front of their eyes, but someone had misjudged the length of rope or maybe the effect of a man’s weight at the end of it. So they stood looking down at the top of his head as his body hung between the tenth and ninth floors.

They’d cut Lefty’s rope correctly, however. He arrived without a scream, his hands free and clasped to the noose. He looked resigned, as if someone had just told him a secret he’d never wanted to hear but had always expected to. Because he’d relieved the weight of the rope with his hands, his neck didn’t break. He arrived in front of their faces like something conjured by magicians. He bounced up and down a few times and then dangled. He kicked at the windows. His movements were not desperate or frantic. They were strangely precise and athletic and the look on his face never changed, even when he saw them watching. He tugged at the rope even as the tracheal cartilage pressed over the edges of it and his tongue flopped over his lower lip.

Joe watched it ebb out of him, slowly, and then all at once. The light left Lefty like a hesitant bird. But once it left, it flew high and fast. The only solace Joe took from it was that Lefty’s eyes, at the very end, fluttered to a close.

He looked at Lefty’s sleeping face and the top of Sal’s head and begged their forgiveness.

I will see you both soon. I will see my father soon. I will see Paolo Bartolo. I will see my mother.

And then:

I am not brave enough for this. I am not.

And then:

Please. God. Please, God. I do not want to meet the dark. I will do anything. I beg your mercy. I cannot die today. I’m not supposed to die today. I’m to be a father soon. She’s to be a mother. We will be good parents. We will raise a fine child.

I am not ready.

He could hear his own breathing as they walked him to the windows that looked down on Eighth Avenue and the streets of Ybor and the bay beyond, and he heard the gunfire before he got there. From this height, the men on the street looked two inches tall as they fired Thompsons and handguns and BARs. They wore hats and raincoats and suits. Some wore police uniforms.

The police were aligned with the Pescatore men. Some of Joe’s men lay in the streets or half out of cars and others kept firing, but they were in retreat. Eduardo Arnaz took a burst straight through his chest and fell against the window of a dress shop. Noel Kenwood was shot in the back and lay in the street, clawing at it. The rest Joe couldn’t identify from up here as the battle moved west, first one block, then two. One of his men crashed a Plymouth Phaeton into the lamppost at the corner of Sixteenth. Before he could get out, the police and a couple Pescatore men surrounded the car and unloaded their Thompsons into it. Giuseppe Esposito had owned a Phaeton, but Joe couldn’t tell from here if he’d been the one driving it.

Run, boys. Just run.

As if they’d heard him, his men stopped firing back and scattered.

Maso placed a hand to the back of Joe’s neck. “It’s over, son.”

Joe said nothing.

“I wished it could have been different.”

“Do you?” Joe said.

Pescatore cars and Tampa PD cars raced down Eighth, and Joe saw several heading north or south along Seventeenth and then east along Ninth or Sixth to outflank his men.

But his men disappeared.

One second a man ran along the street, and the next he was gone. The Pescatore cars would meet at the corners, the gunners pointing desperately, and go back on the hunt.

They gunned down someone on the porch of a casita on Sixteenth, but that seemed to be the only Coughlin-Suarez man they could find at the moment.

One by one, they’d slipped away. Into the air. One by one, they simply weren’t there anymore. The police and the Pescatore men milled in the streets now, pointing fingers, shouting at one another.

Maso said to Albert, “The fuck did they all go?”

Albert held up his hands and shook his head.

“Joseph,” Maso said, “you tell me.”

“Don’t call me Joseph,” Joe said.

Maso slapped him across the face. “What happened to them?”

“They vanished.” Joe looked into the old man’s double-zero eyes. “Poof.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Joe said.

And now Maso raised his voice. Raised it to a roar. And it was a terrifying sound. “Where the fuck are they?”

“Shit.” Albert snapped his fingers. “It’s the tunnels. They dropped into the tunnels.”

Maso turned to him. “What tunnels?”

“The ones running underneath this fucking neighborhood. It’s how they get the booze in.”

“So put men in the tunnels,” Digger said.

“No one knows where most of them are.” Albert jerked a thumb at Joe. “That’s this asshole’s genius. Ain’t that right, Joe?”

Joe nodded, first at Albert and then at Maso. “This is our town.”

“Yeah, well, not anymore,” Albert said and drove the butt of the Thompson into the back of Joe’s head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Higher Ground

Joe woke to blackness.

He couldn’t see and he couldn’t speak. At first he feared somebody had gone so far as to stitch his lips together, but after a minute or so, he suspected something that pressed up against the base of his nose might be tape. The more he accepted this, the more the tacky sensation around his lips, as if the skin were smeared with bubble gum, made sense.

His eyes weren’t taped, though. What had initially presented itself as total dark began to give way to the occasional shape on the other side of a dense shroud of wool or rope.

It’s a hood, something in his chest told him. They’ve got a hood over you.

His hands were cuffed behind his back. Definitely not rope binding them; metal all the way. His legs felt tied, and not terribly tight judging by how much he could move them—what felt like a full inch before he met resistance.

He lay on his right side, his face pressed to warm wood. He could smell low tide. He could smell fish and fish blood. He realized he’d been hearing the engine for some time before he recognized it as such. He’d been on enough boats in his life to recognize what it powered. And then the other sensations coalesced and made sense—the slap of waves against the hull, the rise and fall of the wood on which he lay. He could hardly be sure of this but he didn’t hear any other engines, no matter how hard he concentrated on isolating the various sounds around him. He heard men’s voices and footsteps passing back and forth on the deck and, after a while, he discerned the sharp inhale and fluttering exhale of someone close by smoking a cigarette. But no other engines, and the boat wasn’t going terribly fast. Didn’t feel like it anyway. Didn’t sound like something in flight. Which meant it was fair to assume no one was coming after them.

“Someone get Albert. He’s awake.”

Then they were lifting him—one hand sinking through the hood and into his hair, two more hands under his armpits. He was dragged back along the deck and dropped into a chair, could feel the hard wooden seat under him and the hard wood slats at his back. Hands slid over his wrists and then the cuffs were unlocked. They’d barely had time to pop open before his arms were pulled around the back of the chair and the cuffs were snapped back on. Someone tied his arms and chest to the chair, tied them just short of too tight to breathe. Then someone—maybe the same someone, maybe someone else—did the same to his legs, tying them so tight to the chair legs that movement was out of the question.

They tilted the chair back and he screamed against the tape, the sound of it in his ears, because they were pushing him over the side of the boat. Even with the hood covering his head, he clenched his eyes shut, and he could hear his breath exit his nostrils so desperate and ragged. If breath could beg, his did.

The chair stopped tipping when it met a wall. Joe sat there at a forty-degree angle or so. He guessed his feet and the front chair legs were a foot and a half to two feet off the deck.

Someone removed his shoes. Then his socks. Then the hood.

He batted his eyelids rapid-time at the sudden return of light. And not any light—Florida light, immeasurably strong even though it was diffused by banks of roiling gray clouds. He couldn’t see any sun, but the light managed to bounce off a nickel-plated sea. Somehow the brightness lived in the gray, lived in the clouds, lived in the sea, not strong enough to point to, just strong enough for him to feel its effect.

When he could see clearly again, the first thing that came into focus was his father’s watch. It dangled in front of his eyes. Then Albert’s face came into focus behind it. He let Joe see as he opened the pocket of his cheap vest and dropped the watch in. “I was making do with an Elgin, myself,” he said and leaned forward, hands on his knees. He smiled his small smile at Joe. Behind him, two men dragged something heavy across the deck toward them. Black metal of some kind. With silver handles. The men neared them. Albert stepped back with a bow and a flourish, and they slid the object just below Joe’s bare feet.

It was a tub. The kind one saw at summer cocktail parties. The hosts would have it filled with ice and bottles of white wine and good beer. There wasn’t any ice in it now, though. Or wine. Or good beer.

Just cement.

Joe bucked against his ropes but it was like bucking against a brick house as it fell on top of him.

Albert stepped behind him and slapped the back of the chair and the chair dropped forward and Joe’s legs sank into the cement.

Albert watched him struggle—or try to—with the distant curiosity of a scientist. About the only thing Joe could move was his head. As soon as his feet entered the bucket, they were there to stay. His legs were already bound fast, ankles to knees, not a twitch of mobility available. The cement had been mixed a little earlier judging by the feel of it. It wasn’t soupy. His feet sank into it like they were sinking into slits in a sponge.

Albert sat on the deck in front of him and watched Joe’s eyes as the cement began to set. The sponge sensation gave way to something firmer under the soles of his feet that proceeded to snake around his ankles.

“Takes a while to harden,” Albert said. “Longer than some would think.”

Joe got his bearings when he saw a small barrier island off to his left that looked an awful lot like Egmont Key. Otherwise, nothing around them but water and sky.

Ilario Nobile brought Albert a canvas folding chair and wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Albert rose from the deck. He adjusted the chair so the glare off the sea was off his face. He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. They were on a tugboat. Joe and his chair leaned against the rear wall of the wheelhouse, looking out at the back of the boat. It was a great choice in crafts, Joe had to admit; you wouldn’t know it to look at one, but tugs were fast and they could turn on a fucking dime.

Albert spun Thomas Coughlin’s watch on its chain for a minute, like a boy with his yo-yo, sending it out into the air and then back into his palm with a snap. He said to Joe, “It’s running slow. You know that?”

Even if he could have spoken, Joe doubted he would have.

“Big, expensive watch like this, and it can’t even keep the fucking time right.” He shrugged. “All the money in the world, am I right, Joe? All the money in the world, and some things are just meant to run their course.” Albert looked up at the gray sky and out at the gray sea. “This isn’t a race we enter to place second. We all know the stakes. Fuck up, you die. Trust the wrong person? Stake the wrong horse?” He snapped his fingers. “Lights-out. Have a wife? Kids? That’s unfortunate. Planning a trip to Merry Olde England next summer? The plan just changed. Thought you’d be breathing tomorrow? Fucking, eating, taking a bath? You won’t.” He leaned forward and stabbed his finger into Joe’s chest. “You will be sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And the world will be shut to you. Hell, if two fish go up your nose and a few nibble your eyes? You won’t mind. You’ll be with God. Or the devil. Or no place. Where you won’t be, Joe?” He raised his hands to the clouds. “Is here. So take a good last look. Take some deep breaths. Really suck that oxygen in.” He slipped the watch back into his vest, leaned in, grasped Joe’s face in his hands, and kissed the top of his head. “Because you die now.”

The cement had hardened. It squeezed Joe’s toes, heels, ankles. It squeezed everything so hard he could only assume some of the bones in his feet were broken. Maybe all of them.

He met Albert’s eyes and flicked his own at his left inside pocket.

“Stand him up.”

“No,” Joe tried to say, “look in my pocket.”

“Mmmm! Mmmm! Mmmm!” Albert mimicked, his eyes bulging. “Coughlin, show a little class. Don’t beg.”

They slashed the rope over Joe’s chest. Gino Valocco walked over with a hacksaw and dropped to his knees and sawed away at the front chair legs, cutting them free of the chair bottom.

“Albert,” he said through the tape, “look in this pocket. This pocket. This pocket. This one.”

Every time he said “this,” he jerked his head and his eyes toward the pocket.

Albert laughed and continued to mimic him and some of the other men joined in, Fausto Scarfone going so far as to imitate an ape. He made “hoo hoo hoo” sounds and scratched his armpits. Over and over, he jerked his head to the left.

The left chair leg came free of the seat, and Gino went to work on the right.

“Those are good cuffs,” Albert said to Ilario Nobile. “Take ’em off. He ain’t going anywhere.”

Joe could see he’d hooked him. He wanted to see in Joe’s pocket, but he had to find a way to do it without appearing to give in to his victim’s wishes.

Ilario removed the cuffs and tossed them to Albert’s feet because apparently Albert hadn’t earned enough respect to have them handed to him.

The right chair leg broke free of the seat and they pulled the chair off Joe and he stood upright in the tub of cement.

Albert said, “You get to use your hand once. You either rip the tape off your mouth or you show me what you’re trying to buy your pathetic fucking life with. You can’t do both.”

Joe didn’t hesitate. He reached into his pocket. He removed the photograph and flung it at Albert’s feet.

Albert picked it up off the deck as a dot appeared over his left shoulder, just beyond Egmont Key. Albert looked at the photo with a cocked eyebrow and that small, smug fucking smile of his, and he saw nothing special about it. His eyes flicked all the way to the left again and he began to move them slowly to the right and then his head went very still.

The dot became a dark triangle, moving fast over the glassy gray sea—a hell of a lot faster than the tug, fast as it was, could move.

Albert looked at Joe. It was a sharp and furious look. Joe saw clearly that he wasn’t furious because Joe had stumbled upon his secret. He was furious because he’d been kept as deep in the dark as Joe.

All this time, he’d thought she was dead too.

Christ, Albert, he wanted to say, in this we’re both her sons.

Even with six inches of electrical tape across his mouth, Joe knew Albert could see him smile.

The dark triangle was now, quite clearly, a boat. A classic runabout modified to accommodate extra passengers or bottles in the stern. Cut its speed by a third but that still made it faster than anything on the water. Several of the men on deck pointed and nudged one another.

Albert ripped the tape off Joe’s mouth.

The sound of the boat reached them. A buzz, like a distant wasp swarm.

Albert held the photograph in Joe’s face. “She’s dead.”

“Look dead to you, does she?”

“Where is she?” Albert’s voice was ragged enough for several men to look over at him.

“In the fucking picture, Albert.”

“Tell me where it was taken.”

“Sure,” Joe said, “and I’m sure nothing will happen to me then.”

Albert slammed both his fists into Joe’s ears and the sky pinwheeled overhead.

Gino Valocco shouted something in Italian. He pointed starboard.

A second boat had appeared, another modified runabout, with four men in it, coming out from behind a spoil bank about four hundred yards away.

“Where is she?”

The ringing in Joe’s ears was like a cymbal symphony. He shook his head repeatedly.

“Love to tell you,” he said, “but I’d love not to fucking drown more.”

Albert pointed at first one boat, then the other. “They won’t stop us. Are you a fucking idiot? Where is she?”

“Oh, let me think,” Joe said.

“Where?”

“In the photograph.”

“It’s an old one. You just folded up an old—”

“Yeah, I thought that too at first. But look at that asshole in the tux. The tall one, all the way to the right, leaning against the piano? Look at the newspaper. The one by his elbow, Albert. Look at the fucking headline.”

“That was last month, Albert.”

Now both boats were within 350 yards.

Albert looked at the boats, looked at Maso’s men, looked back at Joe. He let out a long breath through pursed lips. “You think they’re going to rescue you? They’re half our size and we have the high ground. You could send six boats our way and we’ll turn every last one of them into fucking matchsticks.” He turned to the men. “Kill them.”

They lined up along the gunwales. They knelt. Joe counted an even dozen of them. Five to starboard, five to port, Ilario and Fausto heading into the cabin for something. Most of the men on deck carried tommy guns and a few handguns but none had the rifles necessary for long-range shooting.

Ilario and Fausto made that point moot when they dragged a crate back out of the cabin. Joe noticed for the first time that there was a bronze tripod bolted to the deck at the gunwale and a toolbox sitting beside it. Then he realized it wasn’t a tripod exactly; it was a deck mount. For a gun. A big fucking gun. Ilario reached into the crate and removed two ammunition belts of .30-06 rounds that he lay beside the tripod. He and Fausto then reached into the crate and came back out with a 1903 ten-barrel Gatling. They placed it on top of the deck mount and went to work securing it.

The approaching runabouts grew louder. They were maybe 250 yards away now, which put them about a hundred yards out of range for anything but the Gatling. But once that fucker got locked onto the deck mount, it was capable of firing up to nine hundred rounds a minute. One sustained burst into either of the boats and the only thing left would be meat for the sharks.

Albert said, “Tell me where she is, and I’ll make it fast. One shot. You’ll never feel it. If you make me force it out of you, I’ll tear the pieces off you long after you’ve told me. I’ll stack them on the deck until the stack falls over.”

The men shouted at one another, changing their positions as the runabouts began to move erratically, the one on the port side adopting a serpentine pattern while the starboard assault boat jerked right-left, right-left, the engines ratcheting up in pitch.

Albert said, “Just tell me.”

Joe shook his head.

“Please,” Albert said so quietly no one else could hear. With the boat engines and the Gatling assembly, Joe could barely hear. “I love her.”

“I loved her too.”

“No,” Albert said. “I love her.”

They finished securing the Gatling to the deck mount. Ilario inserted the ammunition belt into the feed guide and blew at any dust that might be in the hopper.

Albert leaned into Joe. He looked around them. “I don’t want this. Who wants this? I just want to feel like I felt when I made her laugh or when she threw an ashtray at my head. I don’t even care about the fucking. I just want to watch her drink coffee in a hotel bathrobe. You have that, I hear. With the spic woman?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “I do.”

“What is she by the way? Nigger or spic?”

“Both,” Joe said.

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“Albert,” Joe said, “why on earth would it bother me?”

Ilario Nobile, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, manned the crank handle of the Gatling while Fausto took a seat below the gun, the first of the ammunition belts lying across his lap like a grandmother’s blanket.

Albert drew his long-barrel .38 and placed it to Joe’s forehead. “Tell me.”

No one heard the fourth engine until it was too late.

Joe looked as deep into Albert as he ever had and what he saw there was someone as shit-scared-terrified as everyone else he’d ever known.

“No.”

Farruco Diaz’s plane appeared out of the western clouds. It came in high but dove fast. Dion stood tall in the rear seat, his machine gun secured to the mount Farruco Diaz had busted Joe’s balls about for months until he let him install it. Dion wore thick goggles and seemed to be laughing.

The first thing Dion and his machine gun aimed at was the Gatling.

Ilario turned to his left and Dion’s bullets blew off his ear and moved through his neck like a scythe and the ricochets bounced off the gun and bounced off the deck mount and the deck cleats, and collided with Fausto Scarfone. Fausto’s arms danced in the air by his head and then he tipped over, spitting red everywhere.

The deck was spitting too—wood and metal and sparks. The men ducked, crouched, and curled into balls. They screamed and fumbled with their weapons. Two fell off the boat.

Farruco Diaz’s plane banked and surged toward the clouds and the gunners recovered. They got to their feet and fired away. The steeper the plane climbed, the more vertical they fired.

And some of the bullets came back down.

Albert took one in the shoulder. Another guy grabbed the back of his neck and fell to the deck.

The smaller boats were now close enough to be fired upon. But all of Albert’s gunners had turned their backs to shoot at Farruco’s plane. Joe’s gunners weren’t the best shots—they were in boats and boats that were moving wildly—but they didn’t have to be. They managed to hit hips and knees and abdomens and a third of the men on the boat flopped to the deck and made the noises men made when they were shot in the hip and the knees and the abdomen.

The plane came back for a second pass. Men were firing from the boats and Dion was working that machine gun like it was a fireman’s hose and he was the fire chief. Albert righted himself and pointed his .32 long-barrel at Joe as the back of the boat turned into a tornado of dust and chips of wood and men failing to escape a fusillade of lead and Joe lost sight of Albert.

Joe was hit in the arm by a bullet fragment and once in the head by a wood chip the size of a bottle cap. It ripped off a piece of his left eyebrow and nicked the top of his left ear on its way into the Gulf. A Colt .45 landed at the base of the tub, and Joe picked it up and dropped the magazine into his hand long enough to confirm there were at least six bullets left in it before he slammed it back home.

By the time Carmine Parone reached him, the blood flowing out of the left side of his face looked a lot worse than it was. Carmine gave Joe a towel, and he and one of the new kids, Peter Wallace, set to work on the cement with axes. While Joe had assumed it had already set, it hadn’t, and after fifteen or sixteen swings of the axes and a shovel Carmine had found in the galley, they got him out of there.

Farruco Diaz set his plane down on the water and cut the engine. The plane glided over to them. Dion climbed aboard and the men went about killing the wounded.

“How you doing?” Dion asked Joe.

Ricardo Cormarto tracked a young man who was dragging himself toward the stern, his legs a mess, but the rest of him looking ready for a night out in a beige suit and cream-colored shirt, mango-red tie flipped over his shoulder, like he was preparing to eat a lobster bisque. Cormarto put a burst into his spine and the young man exhaled an outraged sigh, so Cormarto put another burst into his head.

Joe looked at the bodies piled on the deck and said to Wallace, “If he’s alive in all that, bring him to me.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Wallace said.

He tried flexing his ankles but it hurt too much. He placed a hand to the ladder under the wheelhouse and said to Dion, “What was the question again?”

“How you doing?”

“Oh,” Joe said, “you know.”

A guy by the gunwale begged for his life in Italian, but Carmine Parone shot him in the chest and kicked him overboard.

Fasani flipped Gino Valocco over onto his back next. Gino held his hands in front of his face, the blood coming from his side. Joe remembered their conversation about parenting, about there never being a good time to have a kid.

Gino said what everyone said. He said, “Wait.” He said, “Hold—”

But Fasani shot him through the heart and kicked him into the Gulf.

Joe looked away only to find Dion looking at him steadily, carefully. “They would have killed every last one of us. Hunted us down. You know that.”

Joe blinked an affirmative.

“And why?”

Joe didn’t answer.

“No, Joe. Why?”

Joe still didn’t answer.

“Greed,” Dion said. “Not sensible greed, not fucking sane greed. Endless greed. Because it’s never enough for them.” Dion’s face was purple with rage when he leaned in so close to Joe their noses touched. “It’s never fucking enough.”

Dion leaned back and Joe stared at his friend a long time and in that time he heard someone say there was no one left to kill.

“It’s never enough for any of us,” Joe said. “You, me, Pescatore. Tastes too good.”

“What?”

“The night,” Joe said. “Tastes too good. You live by day, you play by their rules. So we live by night and play by ours. But, D? We don’t really have any rules.”

Dion gave that some thought. “Not too many, no.”

“Starting to wear me out.”

“I know it,” Dion said. “I can see it.”

Fasani and Wallace dragged Albert White across the deck and dropped him in front of Joe.

He was missing the back of his head and there was a black gout of blood where his heart should have been. Joe squatted by the corpse and fished his father’s watch from Albert’s vest pocket. He checked it quickly for damage, found none, and pocketed it. He sat back on the deck.

“I was supposed to look him in the eye.”

“How’s that?” Dion said.

“I was supposed to look him in the eye and say, ‘You thought you got me, but I fucking got you.’ ”

“You had that chance four years ago.” Dion lowered his hand to Joe.

“I wanted it again.” Joe took the hand.

“Shit,” Dion said as he lifted him to his feet, “ain’t no one gets that kinda chance twice.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Back to Black

The tunnel that led to the Romero Hotel began at Pier 12. From there it ran eight blocks under Ybor City and took fifteen minutes to traverse if the tunnel wasn’t flooded by high tide or overrun with night rats. Luckily for Joe and his crew, it was midday and low tide when they arrived at the pier. They covered the distance in ten minutes. They were sunburned, they were dehydrated, and in Joe’s case they were wounded, but Joe had impressed upon everyone during the ride in from Egmont Key that if Maso was half as smart as Joe knew he was, he’d have put a limit on when he was supposed to hear back from Albert. If he assumed it had all gone to hell, he’d waste no time making tracks.

The tunnel ended at a ladder. The ladder rose to the door of the furnace room. Beyond the furnace room was the kitchen. Past the kitchen was the manager’s office and beyond that was the front desk. In each of the latter three positions, they could see and hear if anything was waiting for them beyond the doors, but between the top of the ladder and the furnace room lay one hell of a question mark. The steel door was always locked because it was, during normal operation, opened only upon hearing a password. The Romero had never been raided because Esteban and Joe paid the owners to pay the proper people to look the other way and also because it brought no attention to itself. It didn’t run an active speakeasy; it merely distilled and distributed.

After several arguments about how to get through a steel door with three bolts and the wrong end of the lock cylinder on their side, they decided that the best shot among them—in this case, Carmine Parone—would cover from the top of the ladder while Dion solved the lock with a shotgun.

“If there’s anyone on the other side of that door, we’re all fish in a barrel,” Joe said.

“No,” Dion said. “Me and Carmine are fish in a barrel. Hell, I’m not even sure we’ll survive the ricochets. Rest of you nancy boys? Shit.” He smiled at Joe. “Fire in the hole.”

Joe and the other men went back down the ladder and stood in the tunnel and they heard Dion say, “Last chance,” to Carmine and then he fired the first shot into the hinge. The blast was loud—metal meeting metal in a concrete and metal enclosure. Dion didn’t pause, either. With the sound of the fragments still pinging around up there, he fired a second and third blast and Joe assumed that if anyone was left in the hotel, they were coming for them now. Hell, if all that was left was people on the tenth floor, they damn sure knew they were here.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Dion shouted.

Carmine hadn’t made it. Dion lifted his body out of the way and sat him against the wall as they came up the ladder. A piece of metal—who knew from what—had entered Carmine’s brain through his eye, and he stared back at them with his good one, an unlit cigarette still drooping from his lips.

They wrenched the door off its hinges and went into the boiler room and through the boiler room into the distillery and the kitchen beyond. The door between the kitchen and the manager’s office had a circular window in the center that looked out onto a small access way with a rubber floor. The manager’s door was ajar, and the office beyond showed evidence of a recent war party—wax paper with crumbs on top, coffee cups, an empty bottle of rye, overflowing ashtrays.

Dion took a look and said to Joe, “Never expected to see old age, myself.”

Joe exhaled through his mouth and went through the door. They went through the manager’s office and came out behind the front desk and by that point they knew the hotel was empty. It didn’t feel ambush-empty, it felt empty-empty. The place for an ambush had been the boiler room. If they’d wanted to draw them in a little farther just to be sure they caught any stragglers, the kitchen would have been the spot. The lobby, though, was a logistical nightmare—too many places to hide, too easy to scatter, and ten steps from the street.

They sent some men up to the tenth in the elevator and a few more by way of the stairs, just in case Maso had come up with an ambush plan Joe simply couldn’t fathom. The men came back and reported that the tenth was cleaned out, though they had found both Sal and Lefty laid out on the beds in 1009 and 1010.

“Bring ’em down,” Joe said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And have someone bring Carmine in from the ladder too.”

Dion lit a cigar. “I can’t believe I shot Carmine in the face.”

“You didn’t shoot him,” Joe said. “Ricochets.”

“Splitting hairs,” Dion said.

Joe lit a cigarette and allowed Pozzetta, who’d been an army medic in Panama, to take another look at his arm.

Pozzetta said, “You need to get that treated, boss. Get you some drugs.”

“We got drugs,” Dion said.

“The right drugs,” Pozzetta said.

“Go out the back,” Joe said. “Go get me what I need or find the doc’.”

“Yes, sir,” Pozzetta said.

Half a dozen members of the Tampa PD on their payroll were called and came down. One of them brought a meat wagon and Joe said good-bye to Sal and Lefty and Carmine Parone, who just ninety minutes ago had dug Joe out of a cement bucket. It was Sal who got to him the most, though; only in retrospect did the full measure of their five years together hit him. He’d had him into the house for dinner countless times, sometimes brought sandwiches to him in the car at night. He’d entrusted him with his life, with Graciela’s life.

Dion put a hand on his back. “This is a tough one.”

“We gave him a hard time.”

“What?”

“This morning in my office. You and me. We gave him a hard time, D.”

“Yeah.” Dion nodded a couple of times and then blessed himself. “Why’d we do that again?”

“I don’t even know,” Joe said.

“There had to be a reason.”

“I wish it meant something,” Joe said and stepped back so his men could load them into the meat wagon.

“It means something,” Dion said. “Means we should settle up with the fucks who killed him.”

The doctor was waiting at the front desk when they got back from the loading dock and he cleaned Joe’s wound and sutured it while Joe got his reports from the police officers he’d sent for.

“The men he had working for him today,” Joe said to Sergeant Bick of the Third District, “they on his permanent payroll?”

“No, Mr. Coughlin.”

“Did they know they were going after my men in the streets?”

Sergeant Bick looked at the floor. “I gotta assume so.”

“I gotta too,” Joe said.

“We can’t kill cops,” Dion said.

Joe was looking into Bick’s eyes when he said, “Why not?”

“It’s frowned upon,” Dion said.

Joe said to Bick, “You know of any cops who are with Pescatore now?”

“Everyone who shot it out today, sir? They’re writing reports right now. The mayor’s not happy. The chamber of commerce is livid.”

“The mayor’s not happy?” Joe said. “The chamber of fucking commerce?” He slapped Bick’s hat off the top of his head. “I’m not happy! Fuck everyone else! I’m not happy!”

There was an odd silence in the room, and no one knew where to put their eyes. To the best of anyone’s recollection, even Dion’s, no one had ever heard Joe raise his voice before.

When he spoke to Bick again, his voice had returned to its normal pitch. “Pescatore doesn’t fly. He doesn’t like boats, either. That means he’s got only two ways out of this city. So he’s either part of a convoy heading north on Forty-one. Or he’s on the train. So, Sergeant Bick? Pick up your fucking hat and find him.”

A few minutes later, in the manager’s office, Joe called Graciela.

“How you feeling?”

“Your child is a brute,” she said.

“My child, uh?”

“He kick, kick, kick. All the time.”

“On the bright side,” Joe said, “only four more months to go.”

“You,” she said, “are so very funny. I would like to get you pregnant next time. I would like you to feel your stomach in your windpipe. And have to pee more times than you blink.”

“We’ll give that a try.” Joe finished his cigarette and lit another.

“I heard about a gunfight on Eighth Avenue today,” she said, and her voice was much smaller and much harder.

“Yes.”

“Is it over?”

“No,” Joe said.

“You are at war?”

“We are at war,” Joe said. “Yes.”

“When will you be finished?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ever?”

“I don’t know.”

For a minute they said nothing. He heard her smoking from her end and she could hear him smoking from his. He checked his father’s watch and saw that it was now running a full half an hour behind, even though he’d reset it on the boat.

“You don’t see it,” she said eventually.

“See what?”

“That you have been at war since the day we met. And why?”

“To make a living.”

“Is dying a living?”

“I’m not dead,” he said.

“By the end of the day you could be, Joseph. You could. Even if you win today’s battle and the next one and the one after that, there is so much violence in what you do, that it must—it must—come back for you. It will find you.”

Just what his father had told him.

Joe smoked and blew it up toward the ceiling and watched it evaporate. He couldn’t say there wasn’t truth in her words, just as there may have been some in his father’s. But he didn’t have the time for the truth right now.

He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here.”

“I don’t either,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“How do you know it’s a boy?”

“Because he’s kicking at things all the time,” she said. “Just like you.”

“Ah.”

“Joseph?” She inhaled on her cigarette. “Don’t leave me to raise him on my own.”

The only train scheduled to leave Tampa that afternoon was the Orange Blossom Special. Seaboard’s two standard trains had already left and no more were scheduled until tomorrow. The Orange Blossom Special was a deluxe passenger train that ran to and from Tampa in the winter months only. The problem for Maso, Digger, and their men was that it was booked solid.

While they were working on bribing the conductor, the police showed up. And not the ones on their payroll.

Maso and Digger were sitting in the back of an Auburn sedan in a field just west of Union Station, where they had a clear view of the redbrick building and its cake-icing white trim and the five tracks that ran from the back of it, gunmetal rails of hot rolled steel that stretched from this small brick building and endlessly flat land to points north and east and west, splaying like veins across the country.

“Should’ve gotten into railroads,” Maso said. “When there was still a chance back in the teens.”

“We got trucks,” Digger said. “That’s better.”

“Trucks ain’t getting us out of this.”

“Let’s just drive,” Digger said.

“You don’t think they’ll notice a bunch of wops in swell cars and black hats driving through the fucking orange groves?”

“We drive at night.”

Maso shook his head. “Roadblocks. By now? That Irish cocksucker has them set up on every road from here to Jacksonville.”

“Well, a train ain’t the way to go, Pop.”

“Yes,” Maso said, “it is.”

“I can get us a plane out of Jacksonville in—”

“You fly on one of those fucking deathtraps. Don’t ask me to.”

“Pop, they’re safe. They’re safer than… than—”

“Than trains?” Maso pointed. As he did, the air popped with a percussive echo and smoke rose from a field about a mile away.

“Duck hunting?” Digger said.

Maso looked over at his son and thought how sad it was that a man this stupid was the smartest of his three offspring.

“You seen any ducks around here?”

“So then…?” Digger’s eyes narrowed. He actually couldn’t figure it out.

“He just blew up the tracks,” Maso said and looked across at his son. “You get your retard from your mother, by the way. Woman couldn’t win a game of checkers against a bowl of fucking soup.”

Maso and his men waited by a pay phone on Platt while Anthony Servidone went on ahead with a suitcase full of money to the Tampa Bay Hotel. He called an hour later to report that the rooms were taken care of. There was no police presence and no local hoods as far as he could see. Send in the security detail.

They did. Not that there was much of one left after whatever had happened on that tugboat. They’d sent twelve guys out on that boat, thirteen if you counted that Slick Sammy fuck, Albert White. That left a security detail of seven men plus Maso’s personal bodyguard, Seppe Carbone. Seppe was from the same town Maso had grown up in, Alcamo, on the northwest coast of Sicily, though Seppe was much younger, so he and Maso had grown up there in different times. Still, Seppe was a man from that town—merciless, fearless, and loyal to the death.

After Anthony Servidone called back to confirm that the security detail had cleared the floor and the lobby, Seppe drove Maso and Digger to the back of the Tampa Bay Hotel, and they took the service elevator to the seventh floor.

“How long?” Digger said.

“Day after tomorrow,” Maso said. “We keep our heads down until then. Even that mick son of a bitch doesn’t have the pull to keep roadblocks up that long. We drive down to Miami, catch the train from there.”

“I want a girl,” Digger said.

Maso slapped his son hard in the back of the head. “What part of lying low don’t you understand? A girl? A fucking girl? Why don’t you ask her to bring some friends, maybe a couple of guns, you dumb fuck.”

Digger rubbed his head. “A man has needs.”

“You see a man around here,” Maso said, “you point him out to me.”

They arrived at the seventh floor and Anthony Servidone met the lift. He handed Maso his room key and Digger his.

“You clear the room?”

Anthony nodded. “They’re clean. Every one. Whole floor.”

Maso had met Anthony in Charlestown, where everyone was loyal to Maso because it was death if you weren’t. Seppe, on the other hand, had come from Alcamo with a letter from Todo Bassina, the local boss, and had distinguished himself more times than Maso could count.

“Seppe,” he said now, “give the room another look.”

“Subito, capo. Subito.” Seppe’s Thompson cleared his raincoat and he walked through the men gathered outside Maso’s suite and let himself inside.

Anthony Servidone stepped in close. “They were seen at the Romero.”

“Who?”

“Coughlin, Bartolo, a bunch of Cubans and Italians on their side.”

“Coughlin, definitely?”

Anthony nodded. “No question.”

Maso closed his eyes for just a moment. “He even get a scratch?”

“Yeah,” Anthony said quickly, excited to deliver some good news. “Big cut on his head and took a slug to his right arm.”

Maso said, “Well, I guess we should wait for him to die of fucking blood poisoning.”

Digger said, “I don’t think we got that kind of time.”

And Maso closed his eyes again.

Digger walked down to his room with a man on either side of him as Seppe came back out of Maso’s suite.

“It’s all clear, boss.”

Maso said, “I want you and Servidone on the door. Everyone else better act like centurions on the Hun border. Capice?”

“Capice.”

Maso entered the room and removed his raincoat and his hat. He poured himself a drink but from the bottle of anisette they’d sent up. Booze was legal again. Most of it, anyway. And what wasn’t, would be. The country had found sanity again.

A fucking shame, what it was.

“Pour me one, would ya?”

Maso turned, saw Joe sitting on the couch by the window. He had his Savage .32 sitting on his knee with a Maxim silencer screwed onto the muzzle.

Maso wasn’t surprised. Not even a little bit. Just curious about one thing.

“Where were you hiding?” He poured Joe a glass and brought it to him.

“Hiding?” Joe took the glass.

“When Seppe cleared the room?”

Joe used his .32 to point Maso to a chair. “I wasn’t hiding. I was sitting on the bed over there. He walked in and I asked him if he wanted to work for someone who’d be alive tomorrow.”

“That’s all it took?” Maso said.

“It took you wanting to place a fucking dunce like Digger in a position of power. We had a great thing here. A great thing. And you come in and fuck it all up in one day.”

“That’s human nature, isn’t it?”

“Fixing what ain’t broke?” Joe said.

Maso nodded.

“Well, shit,” Joe said, “it doesn’t have to be.”

“No,” Maso said, “but it usually is.”

“You know how many people died today because of you and your fucking greed? You, the ‘simple Wop from Endicott Street’? Well, you ain’t that.”

“Someday, maybe you’ll have a son and then you’ll understand.”

“Will I?” Joe said. “And what will I understand?”

Maso shrugged, as if to put it into words would sully it. “How is my son?”

“By now?” Joe shook his head. “Gone.”

Maso pictured Digger lying facedown on a floor in the next room over, a bullet in the back of his head, the blood pooling on the carpet. He was surprised by how deep and suddenly the grief overtook him. It was so black, so black and hopeless and horrific.

“I’d always wanted you for a son,” he said to Joe and heard his voice break. He looked down at his drink.

“Funny,” Joe said, “I never wanted you for a father.”

The bullet entered Maso’s throat. The last thing he ever saw was a drop of his blood landing in his glass of anisette.

Then it all went back to black.

When Maso fell, he dropped the glass and landed on his knees and his head hit the coffee table. It lay on the right cheek, empty eye staring at the wall to his left. Joe stood and looked at the silencer he’d picked up at the hardware store for three bucks that afternoon. Rumor was Congress was going to raise the price to $200 and then outlaw them entirely.

Pity.

Joe shot Maso through the top of the head just to be sure.

Out in the hall, they’d disarmed the Pescatore guns without a fight as Joe suspected they might. Men didn’t like to fight for a man who thought so little of their lives he’d put an idiot like Digger in charge. Joe exited Maso’s suite and closed the doors behind him and looked at everyone standing around, unsure what would happen next. Dion exited Digger’s room, and they stood in the hallway for a moment, thirteen men and a few machine guns.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Joe said. He looked at Anthony Servidone. “You want to die?”

“No, Mr. Coughlin, I do not want to die.”

“Anyone?” Joe looked around the hallway and got a bunch of solemn head shakes. “If you want to go back to Boston, head back with my blessing. You want to stay down here, get some sun, meet some pretty ladies, we got jobs for you. Ain’t too many people offering those these days, so let us know if you’re interested.”

Joe couldn’t think of anything else to say. He shrugged, and he and Dion got on the lift and took it down to the lobby.

A week later, in New York, Joe and Dion walked into an office at the back of an actuarial firm in Midtown Manhattan and sat across from Lucky Luciano.

Joe’s theory that the most terrifying men were also the most terrified went right out the window. There was no fear in Luciano. There was very little that resembled emotion, in fact, except a hint of black and endless rage in the furthest depths of his dead sea gaze.

The only thing this man knew about terror was how to infect other people with it.

He was dressed impeccably and would have been a handsome man if his skin didn’t look like veal that had been pounded with a meat tenderizer. His right eye drooped from a failed hit on him back in ’29 and his hands were large and looked like they could squeeze a skull until it popped like a tomato.

“You two hoping to walk back out that door?” he said when they took their seats.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then tell me why I gotta replace my Boston management group.”

They did, and as they talked, Joe kept looking for some indication in those dark eyes that he saw their point or didn’t, but it was like talking to a marble floor—the only thing you got back, if you caught the light right, was your own reflection.

When they finished, Lucky stood and looked out the window at Sixth Avenue. “You’ve made a lot of noise down there. What happened to that Holy Roller who died? Wasn’t her father police chief?”

“They forced him into retirement,” Joe said. “Last I heard he was at some kind of sanitarium. He can’t hurt us.”

“But his daughter did. And you let her. That’s why the word on you is that you’re soft. Not a coward. I didn’t say that. Everyone knows how close you got to take care of that yokel back in ’30 and that ship heist took brass ones. But you didn’t take care of that ’shiner back in ’31 and you let a dame—a fucking dame, Coughlin—block your casino play.”

“That’s true,” Joe said. “I got no excuse.”

“No, you don’t,” Luciano said. He looked across the desk at Dion. “What would you have done with the ’shiner?”

Dion looked uncertainly at Joe.

“Don’t you look at him,” Luciano said. “You look at me and you tell me straight.”

But Dion continued to look at Joe until Joe said, “Tell him the truth, D.”

Dion turned to Lucky. “I would have turned out his fucking lights, Mr. Luciano. His sons’ too.” He snapped his fingers. “Taken out the whole family.”

“And the Holy Roller dame?”

“Her I would have disappeared-like.”

“Why?”

“Give her people the option of turning her into a saint. They can tell themselves she’s immaculately concepted up to heaven, whatever. Meanwhile, they’d damn well know we chopped her up and fed her to the reptiles, so they’d never fuck with us again, but the rest of the time, they’d gather in her name and sing her praises.”

Luciano said, “You’re the one Pescatore said was a rat.”

“Yup.”

“Never made sense to us.” He said to Joe, “Why would you knowingly trust a rat who sent you up the river for two years?”

Joe said, “I wouldn’t.”

Luciano nodded. “That’s what we thought when we tried to talk the old man out of the hit.”

“But you sanctioned it.”

“We sanctioned it if you refused to use our trucks and our unions in your new liquor business.”

“Maso never brought that up to me.”

“No?”

“No, sir. He just said I was going to take orders from his son and I had to kill my friend.”

Luciano stared at him for a long time.

“All right,” he said eventually, “make your proposal.”

“Make him boss.” Joe jerked his thumb at Dion.

Dion said, “What?”

Luciano smiled for the first time. “And you’ll stay on as consigliere?”

“Yes.”

Dion said, “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”

Luciano looked at him and the smile died on his face.

Dion read the tea leaves fast. “I’d be honored.”

Luciano said, “Where you from?”

“Town called Manganaro in Sicily.”

Luciano’s eyebrows rose. “I’m from Lercara Friddi.”

“Oh,” Dion said. “The big town.”

Luciano came around the desk. “You gotta be from a real shithole like Manganaro to call Lercara Friddi the ‘big town.’ ”

Dion nodded. “That’s why we left.”

“When was that? Stand up.”

Dion stood. “I was eight.”

“Been back?”

“Why would I go back?” Dion said.

“It’ll remind you of who you are. Not who you pretend to be. Who you are.” He put an arm around Dion’s shoulders. “And you’re a boss.” He pointed at Joe. “And he’s a brain. Let’s go have some lunch. I know a great place a few blocks from here. Best gravy in the city.”

They left the office, and four men fell in around them as they headed for the elevator.

“Joe,” Lucky said, “I need to introduce you to my friend, Meyer. He’s got some great ideas about casinos in Florida and in Cuba.” Now Luciano put his arm around Joe. “You know much about Cuba?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN A Gentleman Farmer in Pinar del Río

When Joe Coughlin met up with Emma Gould in Havana in the late spring of 1935, it had been nine years since the speakeasy robbery in South Boston. He remembered how cool she’d been that morning, how unflappable, and how those qualities had unnerved him. He’d then mistaken being unnerved for being smitten and mistook being smitten for being in love.

He and Graciela had been in Cuba almost a year, staying at first in the guesthouse of one of Esteban’s coffee plantations high in the hills of Las Terrazas, about fifty miles west of Havana. In the morning they woke to the smell of coffee beans and cocoa leaves while mist ticked and dripped off the trees. In the evenings, they walked the foothills while rags of fading sunlight clung to the thick treetops.

Graciela’s mother and sister visited one weekend and never left. Tomas, not even crawling when they’d arrived, took his first step late in his tenth month. The women spoiled him shamelessly and fed him to the point he turned into a ball with thick, wrinkly thighs. But once he began to walk, he quickly began to run. He would run through the fields and up and down the slopes, and the women would chase him so that very soon he was not a ball but a slim boy with his father’s light hair but his mother’s dark eyes and skin that was a cocoa-butter combination of them both.

Joe made a few trips back to Tampa on the tin goose, a Ford Trimotor 5-AT that rattled in the wind and lurched and dipped without warning. He exited a couple of times with his ears so blocked he couldn’t hear the rest of the day. The air nurses gave him gum to chew and cotton to stuff in there, but it was still a primitive way to travel and Graciela wanted no part of it. So he would make the trip without her and find that he missed her and Tomas at a physical level. He would wake in the middle of the night at their house in Ybor with stomach pain so sharp it stole his breath.

As soon as his business was concluded he’d take the first plane he could get down to Miami. Take the next available one out of there.

It wasn’t that Graciela didn’t want to return to Tampa—she did. She just didn’t want to fly there. And she didn’t want to return right now. (Which, Joe suspected, meant she really didn’t want to go back.) So they stayed in the hills of Las Terrazas, and her mother and sister, Benita, were joined by a third sister, Ines. Whatever bad blood had existed between Graciela, her mother, Benita, and Ines looked to have been healed by time and the presence of Tomas. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, Joe followed the sound of their laughter to catch them dressing Tomas like a girl.

One morning Graciela asked if they could buy a place here.

“Here?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be right here. But in Cuba,” she said. “Just a place we could visit.”

“We’d be ‘visiting’?” Joe smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I must get back to work soon.”

She didn’t really. On his trips back, Joe had checked in on the people in whose care she’d left her various charities, and they were all trustworthy men and women. She could stay away from Ybor for a decade and all her organizations would still be standing, hell, flourishing, when she returned.

“Sure, doll. Whatever you want.”

“It wouldn’t have to be a big place. Or a fancy place. Or a—”

“Graciela,” Joe said, “pick whatever you want. You see something and it’s not for sale? Offer them double.”

Not unheard of in those days. Cuba, hit by the Depression worse than most countries, was taking tentative steps toward recovery. The abuses of the Machado regime had been replaced by the hope of Colonel Fulgencio Batista, leader of the Sergeants Revolt that had sent Machado packing. The official president of the Republic was Carlos Mendieta, but everyone knew Batista and his army ran the show. So favored was this arrangement, the American government had started pouring money into the island five minutes after the revolt that put Machado on a plane to Miami. Money for hospitals and roads and museums and schools and a new commercial district along the Malecón. Colonel Batista not only loved the American government, but he also loved the American gambler, so Joe, Dion, Meyer Lansky, and Esteban Suarez, among others, had full access to the highest offices in government. They’d already purchased ninety-nine-year leases on some of the best land along the Parque Central and in the Tacon Market district.

There was no end to the money they’d make.

Graciela said Mendieta was Batista’s puppet and Batista was the puppet of United Fruit and the United States; he’d raid the coffers and rape the land, while the United States kept him propped in place because America believed good deeds could somehow follow bad money.

Joe didn’t argue. He also didn’t point out that they, themselves, had followed bad money with good deeds. Instead he asked her about this house she’d found.

It was a bankrupt tobacco plantation, actually, just outside the village of Arcenas, fifty miles farther west in the Pinar del Río province. It came with a guesthouse for her family and endless fields of black soil for Tomas to run in. The day Joe and Graciela purchased it from the widow, Domenica Gomez, she introduced them to Ilario Bacigalupi outside the attorney’s office. Ilario, she explained, would teach them everything there was to know about farming tobacco, if they were interested.

Joe looked at the small round man with the bandit’s mustache as the widow’s driver whisked her away in a two-toned Detroit Electric. He’d noticed Ilario with the Widow Gomez a few times, always in the background, and had assumed he was a bodyguard in a region where kidnapping wasn’t unheard of. But now he noticed the scarred, oversize hands, the prominence of their bones.

He’d never thought about what he’d do with all those fields.

Ilario Bacigalupi, on the other hand, had given it plenty of thought.

First, he explained to Joe and Graciela, no one called him Ilario; they called him Ciggy, which had nothing to do with tobacco. As a child he’d been incapable of pronouncing his own last name, always getting hung up on the second syllable.

Ciggy told them that 20 percent of the village of Arcenas had, until very recently, depended on the Gomez plantation for work. Since Senor Farmer Gomez had fallen to drink and then fallen off his horse and then fallen into insanity and sickness, there had been no work. For three harvests, Ciggy said, no work. It was why many of the children in the village wore no pants. Shirts, carefully tended to, could last a lifetime, but pants always gave way at some point in the seat or the knees.

Joe had noticed a prevalence of bare-assed children on his drives through Arcenas. Hell, if they weren’t bare-assed, they were naked. Arcenas, in the foothills of Pinar del Río, was more the hope of a village than an actual one. It was a collection of sagging huts with roofs and walls constructed of dried palm fronds. Human waste exited through a trio of ditches that flowed into the same river from which the villagers drank. There was no mayor or town leader to speak of. The streets were cuts of mud.

“We don’t know anything about farming,” Graciela said.

By this point, they were in a cantina in Pinar del Río City.

“I do,” Ciggy said. “I know so much, senorita, that whatever I’ve forgotten is not worth teaching.”

Joe looked into Ciggy’s cagey, knowing eyes and reevaluated the relationship between the foreman and the widow. He’d thought the widow had kept Ciggy for protection, but he now realized Ciggy had spent the sales process watching after his livelihood and making sure the Widow Gomez knew what was expected of her.

“How would you start?” Joe asked him, pouring them all another glass of rum.

“You will need to prepare the seed beds and plow the fields. First thing, patrón. First thing. The season starts next month.”

“Can you stay out of my wife’s way while she fixes up the house?”

He nodded at Graciela several times. “Of course, of course.”

“How many men will you need for this?” she asked.

Ciggy explained that they would need men and children to seed and men to build the seedbeds. They would need men or children to monitor the soil for fungus and disease and mold. They would need men and children to plant and hoe and plow some more and kill the cut worms and mole crickets and stinkbugs. They would need a pilot who didn’t drink too much to dust the crops.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “How much work does this take?”

“We haven’t even discussed topping, suckering, or harvesting,” Ciggy said. “Then there is the stringing, the hanging, the curing, having someone tend the fire in the barn.” He waved his big hand at the breadth of the labor.

Graciela asked, “How much would we make?”

Ciggy pushed the figures across the table to them.

Joe sipped his rum as he looked them over. “So, a good year, if there’s no blue mold or locusts or hailstorms and God shines his light down on Pinar del Río without stop, we make four percent back on our investment.” He looked across the table at Ciggy. “That right?”

“Yes. Because you are only using a quarter of your land. But if you invest in your other fields, bring them back to the state they were in fifteen years ago? In five years, you will be rich.”

“We’re already rich,” Graciela said.

“You will be richer.”

“What if we don’t care about being richer?”

“Then think of it this way,” Ciggy said, “if you leave the village to starve, you may find them all sleeping in your field one morning.”

Joe sat up in his chair. “Is that a threat?”

Ciggy shook his head. “We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.” He solemnly made the sign of the cross. “But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?”

“Not on my land,” Joe said.

“But it’s not your land. It’s God’s. You are renting it. This rum? This life?” He patted his chest. “We are all just renting from God.”

The main house needed almost as much work as the farm.

While the planting season began outside, the nesting season took over on the inside. Graciela had all the walls replastered and repainted, had the flooring in half the house ripped up and replaced when they arrived. There was only one toilet; there were four by the time Ciggy started the topping process.

By then, the rows of tobacco stood about four feet high. Joe woke one morning to air so sweet and fragrant it immediately made him consider the curve of Graciela’s neck with lust. Tomas lay sleeping in his crib when Graciela and Joe went to the balcony and looked out on the fields. They’d been brown when Joe went to sleep, but now a carpet of green sported pink and white blossoms that glittered in the soft morning light. Joe and Graciela looked across the breadth of their land, from the balcony of their house to the foothills of Sierra del Rosario, and the blossoms glittered as far as they could see.

Graciela, standing in front of him, reached back and placed her hand to his neck. He put his arms around her abdomen and placed his chin in the hollow of her neck.

“And you don’t believe in God,” she said.

He took a deep breath of her. “And you don’t believe good deeds can follow bad money.”

She chuckled and he could feel it in his hands and against his chin.

Later that morning, the workers and their children arrived and went through the fields, stalk by stalk, removing the blossoms. Plants spread their leaves as if they were great birds, and from his window the next morning Joe could no longer see the soil, nor any blossoms. The farm, under Ciggy’s stewardship, continued to work without a hitch. For the next stage, he brought in even more children from the village, dozens of them, and sometimes Tomas would laugh uncontrollably because he could hear their laughter in the fields. Joe sat up some nights, listening to the sounds of the boys playing baseball in one of the fallow fields. They’d play until the last of the light had left the sky, using only a broomstick and what remained of a regulation ball they’d found somewhere. The cowhide covering and the wool yarn was long gone, but they’d managed to salvage the cork center.

He listened to their shouts and the snap of the stick against the ball, and he thought of something Graciela had said recently about giving Tomas a little brother or little sister soon.

And he thought, Why stop at one?

Repairing the house moved more slowly than resurrecting the farm. One day Joe traveled to Old Havana, to look up Diego Alvarez, an artist who specialized in the restoration of stained glass. He and Senor Alvarez agreed on a price and a good week for him to make the hundred-mile journey to Arcenas and repair the windows Graciela had salvaged.

After the meeting, Joe visited a jeweler on Avenida de las Misiones that Meyer had recommended. His father’s watch, which had been losing time for more than a year, had stopped completely a month ago. The jeweler, a middle-aged man with a sharp face and a perpetual squint, took the watch and opened the back of it, and explained to Joe that while he owned a very fine watch, it still needed to be tended to more than once every ten years. The parts, he said to Joe, all these delicate parts, you see them? They need to be reoiled.

“How long will it take?” Joe asked.

“I’m not sure,” the man said. “I must take the watch apart and look at each piece.”

“I understand that,” Joe said. “How long?”

“If the pieces need reoiling and nothing more? Four days.”

“Four,” Joe said and felt a flutter in his chest, as if a small bird had just flown through his soul. “No way it could be quicker?”

The man shook his head. “And, senor? If anything is broken, just one small part—and you see how small these parts are?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“I will have to send the watch to Switzerland.”

Joe looked out the dusty windows to the dusty street for a moment. He took his wallet from his inside suit pocket and removed a hundred American, placed the bills on the counter. “I’ll be back in two hours. Have a diagnosis by then.”

“A what?”

“Tell me if it’ll need to go to Switzerland by then.”

“Yes, senor. Yes.”

He left the shop and found himself wandering Old Havana in all its sensual decay. Habana, he’d decided on his many trips here over the past year, wasn’t simply a place; it was the dream of a place. A dream gone drowsy in the sun, fading into its own bottomless appetite for languor, in love with the sexual thrum of its death throes.

He turned one corner and then another and then a third and he was standing on the street where Emma Gould’s brothel was.

Esteban had given him the address more than a year ago now, on the night before that bloody day with Albert White and Maso and Digger and poor Sal and Lefty and Carmine. He supposed he’d known he was coming here since he’d left the house yesterday, but he hadn’t admitted it to himself because to come here seemed silly and frivolous, and very little of him remained frivolous.

A woman stood out front, hosing the sidewalk free of the glass that had been broken the night before. She sent the glass and dirt into the gutter and it ran down the slope of the cobblestone street. When she looked up and saw him, the hose drooped in her hand but didn’t fall.

The years hadn’t been horrible to her, though they hadn’t exactly been fond either. She looked like a beautiful woman whose vices had failed to love her back, who’d smoked and drunk too much, and both habits had found a way to manifest themselves in crow’s-feet and lines around the edges of her mouth and below her lower lip. Her lower eyelids sagged and her hair was brittle, even in all this humidity.

She raised the hose and went back to work. “Say what you have to say.”

“You want to look at me?”

She turned toward him but kept her eyes on the sidewalk, and he had to move to keep his shoes dry.

“So you had the accident and you thought, ‘I’m going to take advantage of this’?”

She shook her head.

“No?”

Another shake of the head.

“Then what?”

“Once the coppers started chasing us, I told the driver the only way to get away was to drive off the bridge. But he wouldn’t listen.”

Joe stepped out of the path of her hose. “So?”

“So I shot him in the back of the head. We went in the water and I swam out and Michael was waiting for me.”

“Who’s Michael?”

“He’s the other fella I was keeping on the hook. He was waiting outside the hotel the whole night.”

“Why?”

She scowled at him. “Once you and Albert started getting all ‘I can’t live without you, Emma. You are my life, Emma,’ I needed some kind of safety net in case you blew each other up. What choice did a gal have? I knew sooner or later I’d have to get out from under your thumbs. God, the way you two would go on.”

“My apologies,” Joe said, “for loving you.”

“You didn’t love me.” She concentrated on a particularly stubborn piece of glass that had lodged itself between two stones in the street. “You just wanted to have me. Like a fucking Grecian vase or a fancy suit. Show me to all your friends, say ‘Ain’t she a dish?’ ” She looked at him now. “I’m not a dish. I don’t want to be owned. I want to own.”

Joe said, “I mourned you.”

“That’s sweet, pumpkin.”

“For years.”

“How did you carry such a cross? Gosh-golly, you’re some man.”

He took another step back from her, even though she’d pointed the hose in the opposite direction, and he saw the whole play for the first time, like a mark who’d been grifted so many times his wife didn’t allow him out of the house unless he left his watch and his pocket change behind.

“You took the money out of the bus locker, didn’t you?”

She waited for the bullet she feared was behind the question, but he raised his hands to show they were empty and would stay that way.

She said, “You did give me the key, remember.”

If there was honor among thieves, then she was right. He’d given her the key; from that point, it was hers to do with as she saw fit.

“And the dead girl? The one they kept finding pieces of?”

She turned off the hose and leaned against the stucco wall of her bordello. “Remember Albert talking about how he’d found himself a new girl?”

“Not really.”

“Well, he did. She was in the car. Never got her name.”

“You kill her too?”

She shook her head, then tapped her forehead. “Her head hit the back of the front seat during the crash. Don’t know if she died then or later, but I didn’t stick around to find out.”

He stood on the street feeling like a fool. A fucking fool.

“Was there a moment when you loved me?” he asked.

She searched his face with growing exasperation. “Sure. Maybe a few moments. We had laughs, Joe. When you stopped mooning over me long enough to fuck me proper, it was really good. But you had to make it something it wasn’t.”

“Which was what?”

“I dunno—something flowery. Something you can’t hold in your hand. We’re not God’s children, we’re not fairy-tale people in a book about true love. We live by night and dance fast so the grass can’t grow under our feet. That’s our creed.” She lit a cigarette and plucked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, gave it to the breeze. “You don’t think I know who you are now? You don’t think I’ve been wondering when you’d show up over here, among the natives? We’re free. No brothers or sisters or fathers. No Albert Whites. Just us. You want to come by? You have an open invitation.” She crossed the sidewalk to him. “We always had a lot of laughs. We could laugh now. Spend our lives in the tropics and count our money on satin sheets. Free as birds.”

“Shit,” Joe said, “I don’t want to be free.”

She cocked her head and seemed confused to the point of genuine sorrow. “But that’s all we ever wanted.”

“It’s all you ever wanted,” he said. “And, hey, now you have it. Good-bye, Emma.”

She set her teeth hard and refused to say it in return, as if by not saying it she retained some power.

It was the kind of stubborn, spiteful pride you found in very old mules and very spoiled children.

“Good-bye,” he said again and walked away without a look back, without a twinge of regret, with nothing left unsaid.

Back at the jeweler’s he was told—delicately and with great care—that the watch would need to make the trip to Switzerland.

Joe signed the release form and the repair order. He took the jeweler’s scrupulously detailed receipt. He placed it in his pocket and left the shop.

He stood on the old street in the Old City and, for a moment, couldn’t think of where to go next.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT How Late It Was

All the boys who worked the farm played baseball, but some were religious about it. As the harvest came upon them, Joe noticed that several had covered their fingertips with surgical tape.

He asked Ciggy, “Where’d they get the tape?”

“Oh, we got boxes of that, man,” Ciggy said. “Back in Machado’s days, they sent in a medical team with some newspaper writers. Show everyone how Machado loved his peasants. Soon as the newspaper writers leave, so do the doctors. They come, take all the equipment, but we hold on to a carton of that tape for the little ones.”

“Why?”

“You ever cured tobacco, man?”

“No.”

“Well, if I show you why, then will you stop asking dumb questions?”

“Probably not,” Joe said.

The tobacco stalks were now taller than most men, their leaves longer than Joe’s arm. He didn’t allow Tomas to run in the tobacco patch any longer for fear he could lose him. The croppers—mostly older boys—arrived one morning and picked the leaves from the ripest stalks. The leaves were piled on wooden sleds and then the sleds were unhitched from the mules and hitched to tractors. The tractors were driven to the curing barn on the western edge of the plantation, a task left to the youngest boys. Joe stepped out on the porch of the main house one morning, and a boy no older than six puttered past him on a tractor, a sledful of leaves piled high behind him. The boy gave Joe a big smile and a wave and kept puttering along.

Outside the curing barn, the leaves were pulled from the sleds and placed on stringing benches under the shade trees. The stringing benches had racks affixed to them. The stringers and the handers—all the baseball boys with the surgical tape on their fingers—would place a stick in the rack and begin tying the leaves to the sticks with twine until the leaf bunches hung from one end of the tobacco stick to the other. They did this from six in the morning until eight at night; there was no baseball those weeks. The twine had to be pulled tight while retaining pressure on the stick, so cord burns to the hands and the fingers were common. Hence, Ciggy pointed out, the surgical tape.

“Soon as this is done, patrón? All this ’bacco hung, one end of the barn to the other? We sit for five days while it cures. Only man has a job is the man tending the fire in the barn and the men checking it don’t get too moist or too dry in there. The boys? They get to play the baseball.” He put a quick hand on Joe’s arm. “If that’s okay with you.”

Joe stood outside the barn, watching those boys string tobacco. Even with the rack, they had to raise and extend their arms to tie off the leaves—raise and extend them for pretty much fourteen hours straight. He gave Ciggy a foul look. “Of course it’s okay. Christ, that fucking work is unbearable.”

“I did it for six years.”

“How?”

“I don’t like starving. You like starving?”

Joe rolled his eyes.

“Mmm hmm. Another man,” Ciggy said, “don’t like starving. Only thing the whole world agrees on—starving is no fun.”

The next morning, Joe found Ciggy in the curing barn, making sure the hangers spaced the leaves properly. Joe told him to pull himself away, and they crossed the fields and walked down the eastern ridge and stopped at the worst field Joe owned. It was rocky, it was blocked from the sun by hills and outcrops all day, and the worms and weeds loved it.

Joe asked if Herodes, their best driver, worked much during curing.

“He’s still working the harvest,” Ciggy said, “but not like the boys.”

“Good,” Joe said. “Have him plow this field.”

“Ain’t nothing going to grow here,” Ciggy said.

“No shit,” Joe said.

“So why plow it?”

“Because it’s easier to build a baseball field on level ground, don’t you think?”

The same day they constructed the pitcher’s mound, Joe was walking with Tomas past the barn when he saw one of the workers, Perez, beating his son, just clouting his head like the boy was a dog he’d caught eating his supper. Kid couldn’t have been any older than eight. Joe said, “Hey,” and started toward them, but Ciggy stepped in front of him.

Perez and Perez’s son looked at him, confused, and Perez hit his son in the head again and then in the ass several times.

“Is that necessary?” Joe said to Ciggy.

Tomas, oblivious, squirmed for Ciggy, to whom he’d taken a shine lately.

Ciggy took Tomas from Joe and held him high above him as Tomas giggled and Ciggy said, “You think Perez likes to hit his boy? Think he woke up, said I want to be a bad guy, make sure the boy grows up to hate me? No, no, no, patrón. He woke up saying I got to put food on the table, I got to keep them warm, keep them dry, fix that roof leak, kill the rats in their bedroom, show them the right path, show my wife I love her, have five fucking minutes for myself, and sleep for four hours before I got to get up and go back into the fields. And when I leave for the fields, I can hear the littlest ones crying—‘Papa, I’m hungry. Papa, there’s no milk. Papa, I feel sick.’ And he comes back day after day to that, goes out day after day to that, and then you give his son a job, patrón, and it’s like you saved his life. Because maybe you did. But then his son fails at this job? Cono. That son gets beat. Better beat than hungry.”

“What did the boy fail at?”

“He was supposed to watch the curing fire. He fell asleep. Could have burned the whole crop.” He handed Tomas back to Joe. “Could have burned himself.”

Joe looked at the father and son now. Perez had his arm around the boy, the boy nodding, the father speaking in low tones and kissing the side of the boy’s head several times, the lesson delivered. The boy didn’t seem to soften under the kisses, though. So the father pushed his head away and they both went back to work.

The baseball field was completed the day the tobacco was moved from the barn to the pack house. Preparing the leaves for market was a job left mostly to the women, who walked up the hill to the plantation in the morning as hard-faced and hard-fisted as the men. While they sorted and graded the tobacco, Joe gathered the boys in the field and gave them the gloves and fresh balls and Louisville sluggers that had arrived two days before. He laid out three base pads and home plate.

It was as if he’d shown them how to fly.

In the early evenings, he’d take Tomas to watch the games. Sometimes Graciela would join them, but her presence often proved to be too distracting for a couple of the boys entering early adolescence.

Tomas, one of those kids who never sat still, was rapt in the presence of the game. He sat quietly, hands clasped between his knees, watching something he couldn’t possibly understand yet, but which worked on him the way music and warm water did.

Joe said to Graciela one night, “Outside of us, there’s no hope in that town but baseball. They love it.”

“That’s good then, yes?”

“Yeah, it’s great. Shit on America all you want, honey, but we export some good things.”

She gave him a flash of wry brown eyes. “But you charge for it.”

Who didn’t? What made the world run, if not free trade? We give to you, and you give something back in return.

Joe loved his wife, but she still seemed unable to accept that her own country, while undoubtedly beholden to his, was far better off for the transaction. Before the United States had pulled their asses out of the fire, Spain had left them languishing in a cesspool of malaria and bad roads and nonexistent medical care. Machado hadn’t improved on the model. But now, with General Batista, they had a surging infrastructure. They had indoor plumbing and electricity in a third of the country and half of Havana. They had good schools and a few decent hospitals. They had a longer life expectancy. They had dentists.

Yes, the United States exported some of its goodwill at the point of a gun. But all the great countries who’d advanced civilization throughout history had done the same.

And when you considered Ybor City, hadn’t he? Hadn’t she? They’d built hospitals with blood money. Pulled women and children off the streets with rum profits.

Good deeds, since the dawn of time, had often followed bad money.

And now, in baseball-crazy Cuba, in a region where they would have been playing it with sticks and bare hands, they had gloves so new the leather creaked and bats as blond as peeled apples. And every evening, when the work was done and the rest of the green stems had been removed from the leaves, and the crop had been sheeted and packed, and the air smelled of the remoistened tobacco and tar, he sat on a chair beside Ciggy and watched the shadows lengthen in the field, and they discussed where they’d buy the seed for the outfield grass so it would no longer be a scrabble of dirt and loose stone out there. Ciggy had heard rumors of a league near these parts, and Joe asked him to keep looking into it, particularly for the fall when the farm duties would be at their lightest.

On market day, their tobacco sold for the second-highest price at the warehouse, 400 sheets of tobacco, weighing an average of 275 pounds, went to a single buyer, the Robert Burns Tobacco Company, which manufactured the panatela, the new American sensation in cigars.

To celebrate, Joe gave bonuses to all the men and women. He gave two cases of Coughlin-Suarez rum to the village. Then on Ciggy’s suggestion, he rented a bus and he and Ciggy took the baseball team to their first movie at the Bijou in Viñales.

The newsreels were all about the Nuremberg Laws taking effect in Germany—footage of anxious Jews packing up belongings and leaving furnished apartments behind to head for the first train out. Joe had read accounts recently that claimed Chancellor Hitler represented an authentic threat to the fragile peace that had held in Europe since ’18, but he doubted the funny-looking little man would go much further with this lunacy, now that the world had sat up and taken notice; there just wasn’t any percentage in it.

The shorts that followed were forgettable, though the boys on the team all laughed a lot, their eyes as wide as the base pads he’d bought them, and it took Joe a moment to realize that they knew so little of the movies they’d thought the newsreels about Germany were the feature.

Then came the main event—an oater called Riders of the Eastern Ridge starring Tex Moran and Estelle Summers. The credits flashed quick across the black screen and Joe, who never went to movies in the first place, couldn’t have cared less who was responsible for making it. He was, in fact, starting to look down to make sure his right shoe was tied when the name that popped on the screen snapped his eyes back up:

Joe looked over at Ciggy and the boys, but they were oblivious.

My brother, he wanted to tell someone. My brother.

On the bus ride back to Arcenas, he couldn’t stop thinking about the movie. A Western, yes, with gunfights galore and a damsel in distress, and a stagecoach chase along a crumbling cliff road, but something else too, if you knew Danny. The character Tex Moran had played was an honest sheriff in what turned out to be a dirty town. A town where the most prominent citizens gathered one night to plot the death of a swarthy migrant farmer who, one claimed, had ogled his daughter. In the end, the movie retreated from its own radical premise—the good townspeople learned the error of their ways—but only after the swarthy migrant farmer had been killed by a group of outsiders in black hats. The message of the movie, then, as far as Joe could tell, was that the danger from without would wash clean the danger from within. Which, in Joe’s experience—and in Danny’s—was bullshit.

But, either way, it was a hell of a fun time at the theater. The boys had gone wild for it; the whole bus ride home they’d talked about buying six-guns and gun belts when they grew up.

Late that summer, his watch returned from Geneva by mail. It arrived in a lovely mahogany box with velvet inlay and gleamed from a polishing.

Joe was so overjoyed that it would be days before he could admit to himself that it still ran a bit slow.

In September, Graciela received a letter informing her that the Greater Ybor Board of Overseers had elected her Woman of the Year for her work with the less fortunate in the Latin Quarter. The Greater Ybor Board of Overseers was a loose collection of Cuban, Spanish, and Italian men and women who gathered once a month to discuss their shared interests. In the first year, the group had disbanded three times while most of the meetings had ended in fights that spilled out of the restaurant of choice and into the street. The fights were usually between the Spaniards and the Cubans, but every now and then the Italians threw a punch or two so they wouldn’t feel left out. After enough of the bad blood had been given full measure, the members managed to find common ground in their shared exile from the rest of Tampa and grew into a fairly powerful interest group in a very short time. If Graciela would agree, the board wrote, they would be pleased to present her with her award at a gala to be held at the Don Ce-Sar Hotel on St. Petersburg Beach the first weekend in October.

“What do you think?” Graciela asked over breakfast.

Joe was groggy. He’d been having variations on the same nightmare lately. He was with his family and they were somewhere foreign, Africa he felt, but he couldn’t say why exactly. Just that they were surrounded by tall grass and it was very hot. His father appeared at the limit of his vision, at the farthest edge of the fields. He said nothing. He just watched as the panthers emerged from the tall grass, sleek and yellow-eyed. They were the same shade of tan as the grass and, thus, impossible to see until it was too late. When Joe saw the first of them, he shouted to warn Graciela and Tomas, but his throat had already been removed by the cat that sat on his chest. He noticed how red his blood looked on its great white teeth and then he closed his eyes as the cat went back for seconds.

He poured himself more coffee and willed the dream from his head.

“I think,” he said to Graciela, “that it’s time for you to see Ybor again.”

The restoration of the house, much to their surprise, was mostly complete. And last week Joe and Ciggy had laid the grass sod for the outfield. There was nothing holding them to Cuba, for the time being, except Cuba.

They left near the end of September at the end of the rainy season. They left Havana Harbor and crossed the Florida Straits and steamed due north along the west coast of Florida, arriving at the Port of Tampa in the late afternoon of September 29.

Seppe Carbone and Enrico Pozzetta, both of whom had risen fast in Dion’s organization, met them in the terminal, and Seppe explained that word had leaked of their arrival. He showed Joe page five of the Tribune:

The story alleged that the Ku Klux Klan was making threats again and that the FBI was mulling an indictment.

“Jesus,” Joe said, “where do they come up with this shit?”

“Take your coat, Mr. Coughlin?”

Over his suit, Joe wore a silk raincoat he’d bought in Havana. It was imported from Lisbon and sat as lightly on him as a layer of epidermis, but the rain couldn’t make a dent in it. The final hour of the boat ride Joe had seen the clouds massing, which was no surprise—Cuba’s rainy season might be far worse, but Tampa’s was no joke, either, and judging by the clouds, it was still hanging around.

“I’ll keep it on,” Joe said. “Help my wife with her bags.”

“Of course.”

The four of them left the terminal and walked into the parking lot, Seppe to Joe’s right, Enrico to Graciela’s left. Tomas rode Joe’s hip, his arms around his neck, Joe checking the time, when the sound of the first gunshot reached them.

Seppe died on his feet—Joe had seen it enough times. He continued to hold Graciela’s bags as the hole went straight through the center of his head. Joe turned as Seppe fell and the second gunshot followed the first, the gunman saying something in a calm, dry voice. Joe clutched Tomas to his shoulder and threw himself at Graciela and they all toppled to the ground.

Tomas cried out, more in shock than pain as far as Joe could tell, and Graciela grunted. Joe heard Enrico firing his gun. He looked over, saw that Enrico was hit in the neck, the blood coming out of him way too fast and way too dark, but he was firing his ’17 Colt .45, firing it under the car nearest to him.

Now Joe heard what the shooter was saying.

“Repent. Repent.”

Tomas wailed. Not in pain but in fear, Joe knew the difference. He said to Graciela, “You okay? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “Wind knocked out. Go.”

Joe rolled off them, drew his .32, and joined Enrico.

“Repent.”

They fired under the car at a pair of tan boots and trouser legs.

“Repent.”

On Joe’s fifth try, he and Enrico hit bull’s-eyes on the same shots. Enrico’s blew a hole in the shooter’s left boot and Joe’s snapped his left ankle in half.

Joe looked over at Enrico in time to see him cough once and die. It was that quick and he was gone, the gun in his hand still smoking. Joe jumped over the hood of the car between him and the shooter and landed on the ground in front of Irving Figgis.

He was dressed in a tan suit with a faded white shirt. He wore a straw cowboy hat and used his pistol, a long-barrel Colt, to push himself to his one good foot. Stood there on the gravel in his tan suit with his shattered foot dangling from his ankle nub like his pistol dangled from his hand.

He looked in Joe’s eyes. “Repent.”

Joe kept his own gun aimed at the center mass of Irv’s chest. “I don’t follow.”

“Repent.”

“Fine,” Joe said. “To who?”

“God.”

“Who says I don’t?” Joe took a step closer. “What I won’t do, Irv, is repent to you.”

“Then repent to God,” Irv said, his breath thin and rushed, “in my presence.”

“No,” Joe said. “ ’Cause then it’s still about you and not about God, isn’t it?”

Irv shuddered several times. “She was my baby girl.”

Joe nodded. “But I didn’t take her from you, Irv.”

“Your kind did.” Irv’s eyes opened and fixed on Joe’s person, on something in the waist area.

Joe glanced down, didn’t see anything.

“Your kind,” Irv repeated. “Your kind.”

“What’s my kind?” Joe asked and risked another glance down his own chest, still couldn’t see anything.

“Those with no God in their heart.”

“I got God in my heart,” Joe said. “He’s just not your God. Why’d she kill herself in your bed?”

“What?” Irv was weeping now.

“Three bedrooms in that house,” Joe said. “Why’d she kill herself in yours?”

“You sick and lonely man. You sick and lonely…”

Irv looked at something over Joe’s shoulder and then back at his waistline.

And it got the better of Joe. He took a hard look at his waist and saw something that hadn’t been there when he’d left the boat. Something that wasn’t on his waist; it was on his coat. In his coat.

A hole. A perfectly round hole on the right flap, just by his right hip.

Irv met his eyes and there was a great shame there.

“I am,” Irv said, “so sorry.”

Joe was still trying to piece it together when Irv saw what he’d been waiting for and took two one-legged hops onto the road and into the path of a coal truck.

The driver hit Irv and then he hit his brakes, but all that did was cause him to skid on the red brick and Irv went under the tires and the truck bounced when it crushed his bones and rolled over him.

Joe turned away from the road, heard the driver still skidding and he looked at the hole in his raincoat and realized the bullet had passed through from behind. Passed through clean, missed his hip by who knew how few or how many inches. The flap would have been swaying in the air at that point as he covered his family. As he…

He looked over the car and he saw Graciela trying to stand and the blood that poured out of her waist, out of her entire midsection. He dove over the hood of the car and landed on his hands and knees in front of her.

She said, “Joseph?”

He could hear the fear in her voice. He could hear the knowledge in her voice. He tore off his coat. He found the wound just above her groin and he pressed the wadded-up coat to her midsection and he said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

She wasn’t trying to move anymore. She probably couldn’t.

A young woman dared to stick her head out of the terminal door and Joe screamed, “Call a doctor! A doctor!”

The woman went back inside and Joe saw Tomas staring at him, his mouth open but no sound coming out.

“I love you,” Graciela said. “I always loved you.”

“No,” Joe said and pressed his forehead to hers. He pressed the coat as hard as he could against the wound. “No, no, no. You’re my… you’re my… No.”

She said, “Shhh.”

He pulled his head back from hers as she drifted off and kept drifting.

“World,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE A Man in His Profession

He remained a great friend of Ybor, though few knew him. None, certainly, knew him the way he’d been known when she was alive. Then, he’d been pleasant and surprisingly open for a man in his profession. Now he was pleasant.

He grew old very fast, some said. He walked with hesitancy, as if he limped, though he didn’t.

Sometimes he took the boy fishing. This was usually at sunset when the snook and redfish were most likely to bite. They’d sit on the seawall where he’d taught the boy how to tie his line, and every now and then he’d put his arm around the boy, speak softly into his ear, and point toward Cuba.