Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“I’m a beat that dog or that boy to death,” Desouza said, his eyes never leaving the toolbox. “One of the two.”

Joe met with their bomber, Manny Bustamente, in the library of the Circulo Cubano, where everyone but Joe smoked a cigar, even Graciela. Out on the streets, it was the same thing—nine- and ten-year-old kids walking around with stogies in their mouths the size of their legs. Every time Joe lit one of his puny Murads, he felt like the whole city laughed at him, but cigars gave him a headache. Looking around the library that night, though, at the brown blanket of smoke that hung above their heads, he assumed he was going to have to get used to headaches.

Manny Bustamente had been a civil engineer in Havana. Unfortunately his son had been part of the Student Federation at the University of Havana, which spoke out against the Machado regime. Machado closed the university and abolished the federation. One day several men in army uniforms came to Manny Bustamente’s house a few minutes after sunup. They put his son on his knees in the kitchen and shot him in the face and then they shot Manny’s wife when she called them animals. Manny was sent to prison. Upon his release, it was suggested to him that leaving the country would be an exceptional idea.

Manny told this to Joe in the library at ten o’clock that evening. It was, Joe assumed, a way to reassure him of Manny’s devotion to his cause. Joe didn’t question his devotion; he questioned his speed. Manny was five foot two and built like a bean pot. He breathed heavily after walking up a flight of stairs.

They were going over the layout of the ship. Manny had serviced the engine when it had first arrived in port.

Dion asked why the navy didn’t have its own engineers.

“They do,” Manny said. “But if they can get a y … especialista to look at these old engines, they do. This ship is twenty-five years old. It was built as a… ” He snapped his fingers and spoke quickly to Graciela in Spanish.

“A luxury liner,” she said to the room.

“Yes,” Manny said. He spoke to her again in rapid Spanish, a full paragraph of it. When he finished, she explained to them that the ship had been sold to the navy during the Great War and then turned into a hospital ship afterward. Recently it had been recommissioned as a transport ship with a crew of three hundred.

“Where’s the engine room?” Joe asked.

Again Manny spoke to Graciela and she translated. It actually made things move a lot faster.

“Bottom of the ship, at the stern.”

He asked Manny, “If you’re called to the ship in the middle of the night, who will greet you?”

He started to speak to Joe but then turned to Graciela and asked her a question.

“The police?” she said, frowning.

He shook his head, spoke again to her.

“Ah,” she said, “ veo, veo , sí .” She turned to Joe. “He means the naval police.”

“The Shore Patrol,” Joe said, looking over at Dion. “You on top of that?”

Dion nodded. “On top of it? I’m ahead of you.”

“So you get past the Shore Patrol,” Joe said to Manny, “you get into the engine room. Where’s the nearest sleeping berth?”

“One deck up and down the other end,” Manny said.

“So the only personnel near you are the two engineers?”

“Yes.”

“And how do you get them out of there?”

From over by the window, Esteban said, “We have it on good authority that the chief engineer is a drunk. If he even goes to the engine room to double-check our man’s assessment, he won’t stay.”

“What if he does, though?” Dion said.

Esteban shrugged. “They improvise.”

Joe shook his head. “We don’t improvise.”

Manny surprised them all when he reached into his boot and came back with a one-shot derringer with a pearl handle. “I will take care of this man if he does not leave.”

Joe rolled his eyes at Dion, who was closer to Manny.

Dion said, “Give me that,” and snatched the derringer from Manny’s hand.

“You ever shot anybody?” Joe said. “Ever kill a man?”

Manny sat back. “No.”

“Good. Because you’re not starting tonight.”

Dion tossed the gun to Joe. He caught it and held it up before Manny. “I don’t care who you kill,” he said and wondered if that were true, “but if they frisked you, they would have found this. Then they would have taken an extra hard look at your toolbox and found the bomb. Your primary job tonight, Manny? Is to not fuck this up. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes,” Manny said. “Yes.”

“If the chief engineer stays in that room, you repair the engine and walk away.”

Esteban came off the window. “No!”

“Yes,” Joe said. “Yes. This is an act of treason against the United States government. Do you comprehend that? I’m not doing it just so I can get caught and strung up at Leavenworth. If anything goes south, Manny, you walk the fuck back off that boat and we figure out another way. Do not—look at me, Manny—do not improvise. ¿Comprende? ”

Manny nodded eventually.

Joe indicated the bomb in the canvas bag at his feet. “This has a short, short fuse.”

“I understand this.” Manny blinked at a drop of sweat that fell from his eyebrow and then wiped the brow with the back of his hand. “I am fully committed to this event.”

Great, Joe thought, he’s overweight and overheated.

“I appreciate that,” Joe said, catching Graciela’s eyes for a moment, seeing the same concern in hers that probably lived in his. “But, Manny? You have to be committed to doing it and getting off that boat alive. I’m not saying this because I’m so swell and I care about you. I’m not and I don’t. But if you’re killed and they identify you as a Cuban national, the plan falls apart right there and then.”

Manny leaned forward, his cigar as thick as a hammer grip between his fingers. “I want freedom for my country and I want Machado dead and the United States to leave my lands. I have remarried, Mr. Coughlin. I have three niños, all under six years old. I have a wife I love, God forgive me, more than my wife who died. I’m old enough that I would rather live as a weak man than die a brave one.”

Joe gave him a grateful smile. “Then you’re the guy I want delivering this bomb.”

The USS Mercy weighed ten thousand tons. It was a four-hundred-foot-long, fifty-two-foot-wide, plumb-bow displacement ship with two smokestacks and two masts. The mainmast sported a crow’s nest that seemed to Joe like it belonged on a ship from another time, when brigands roamed the high seas. Two faded crosses were painted on the smokestacks, which confirmed her history as a hospital ship, as did the white of her paint. She looked worked over, creaky, but the white of her gleamed against the black water and the night sky.

They were up on the catwalk above a grain silo at the end of McKay Street—Joe, Dion, Graciela, and Esteban, looking out at the ship moored at Pier 7. A dozen silos clustered there, sixty feet high, the last of the grain having been stored there this afternoon by a Cargill ship. The night watchman had been paid off, told to make sure he told the police tomorrow that it was Spaniards who tied him up, and then Dion knocked him out with two swings of a lead sap to make it look authentic.

Graciela asked Joe what he thought.

“Of what?”

“Our chances.” Graciela’s cigar was long and thin. She blew rings over the rail of the catwalk and watched them float over the water.

“Honestly?” Joe said. “Slim to none.”

“Yet it’s your plan.”

“And it’s the best one I could think of.”