Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Joe said, “she was.”

“ How? What didn’t I see?”

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

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

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

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

“Of course, sir.”

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

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

“Navy ship,” Joe said. “Yeah.”

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

“I got my answer.”

“And?”

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

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

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

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

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

“We own a piece.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Senor Coughlin?” She held out a hand.

“Yes.” He shook her hand.

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

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

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

“Yes,” Joe said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They took their seats.

Dion said, “Are there two of you?”

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

Joe and Dion nodded but said nothing.

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