Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

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Live by Night: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba.
is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excellent,” Joe said. “Thank you.”

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

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

“This is exceptional.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So why do this at all?”

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

“More money, you mean.”

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

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

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

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

Joe said, “Yeah?”

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

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

Esteban gave it all a diffident shrug.

“They’re good,” Joe said.

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

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

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

“Were you?” Dion asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure you do.”

“We don’t control the tides.”

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

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

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

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

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

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