Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“It seems quite good.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She shook her head, though he thought he saw the smallest twitch of her lips. “It’s a statement. If you played good guitar, I would tell you and still not like you.”

“Because I leered?”

“Because you are arrogant.”

“Oh.”

“Like all Americans.”

“And all Cubans are what?”

“Proud.”

He smiled. “According to the papers I’ve been reading, you’re also lazy, quick to anger, incapable of saving money, and childish.”

“You think this is true?”

“No,” he said. “I think assumptions about an entire country or an entire people are pretty fucking stupid in general.”

She drew on her cigar and looked at him for a bit. Eventually, she turned to look out at the ship again.

The lights of the waterfront turned the lower edges of the sky a pale, chalky red. Beyond the channel, the city lay sleeping in the haze. Far off at the horizon line, thin bolts of lightning carved jagged white veins in the skin of the world. Their faint and sudden light would reveal swollen clouds as dark as plums massed out there like an enemy army. At one point, a small plane passed directly overhead, four lights in the sky, one small engine, a hundred yards above, possibly for a legitimate purpose, though it was hard to imagine what that could be at three in the morning. Not to mention, in the short time he’d been in Tampa, Joe had come across very little activity he’d describe as legitimate.

“Did you mean what you told Manny tonight, that it makes no difference to you whether he lives or dies?”

They could see him now, walking along the pier toward the ship, toolbox in hand.

Joe leaned his elbows on the rail. “Pretty much.”

“How does anyone become so callous?”

“Takes less practice than you’d think,” Joe said.

Manny stopped at the gangplank where two sailors of the Shore Patrol met him. He raised his arms while one of the SPs patted him down and the other opened the toolbox. He rifled through the top tray and then removed it and placed it on the pier.

“If this goes well,” Graciela said, “you’ll take over rum distribution in Tampa.”

“In half of Florida, actually,” Joe said.

“You’ll be powerful.”

“I guess.”

“Your arrogance will reach new heights then.”

“Well,” Joe said, “one can hope.”

The SP stopped frisking Manny and he lowered his hands, but then that sailor joined his partner and they both looked at something in the toolbox, started conferring, their heads lowered, one with his hand on the butt of his .45.

Joe looked down the parapet at Dion and Esteban. They were frozen, necks extended, eyes locked on that toolbox.

Now the SPs were ordering Manny to join them. He stepped in between them and looked down too. One of them pointed, and Manny reached down into the toolbox and came back with two pints of rum.

“Shit,” Graciela said. “Who told him to bribe them?”

“I didn’t,” Esteban said.

“He’s making up things on the fly,” Joe said. “This is fucking great. This is wonderful.”

Dion slapped the parapet.

“I didn’t tell him to do this,” Esteban said.

“I specifically told him not to do this,” Joe said. “‘Don’t improvise,’ I said. You were wit—”

“They’re taking it,” Graciela said.

Joe narrowed his eyes, saw each of the SPs put a bottle inside his tunic and step aside.

Manny closed his toolbox and walked up the gangplank.

For a moment, they were very quiet on the roof.

Then Dion said, “I think I just coughed up my own asshole.”

“It’s working,” Graciela said.

“He got on,” Joe said. “He’s still got to do his job and get back off.” He looked at his father’s watch: 3 A.M. on the nose.

He looked over at Dion, who read his thoughts. “I’d figure they started busting up that joint ten minutes ago.”

They waited. The metal of the catwalk was still warm from a day of baking in the August sun.

Five minutes later one of the SPs walked to a ringing phone on the deck. A few moments later, he came running back down the gangplank and slapped his partner’s arm. The SPs ran a few yards along the pier to a scout car. They drove down the pier and turned left, headed into Ybor, to the club on Seventeenth where ten of Dion’s guys were, at this moment, beating the shit out of about twenty sailors.

“So far”—Dion smiled at Joe—“admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“Everything’s going like clockwork.”

“So far,” Joe said.

Beside him, Graciela drew on her cigar.

The sound reached them, the echo of a surprisingly dull thud. Didn’t sound like much, but the catwalk swayed for a moment, and they all held out their arms as if they stood atop the same bicycle. The USS Mercy shuddered. The water around it rippled and small waves broke against the pier. Smoke as thick and gray as steel wool billowed from a hole in the hull the size of a piano.

The smoke grew thicker, darker, and after a few moments of staring at it, Joe could see a yellow ball blooming behind it, pulsing like a beating heart. He kept looking until he saw red flames mixed in with the yellow, but then both colors vanished behind the plumes of smoke, which was now the black of fresh tar. It filled the channel and blotted out the city beyond, blotted out the sky.

Dion laughed and Joe met his eyes and Dion kept laughing, shaking his head, and nodding at Joe.

Joe knew what the nod meant— this was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesmen of the world, the truck drivers and lawyers and bank tellers and carpenters and Realtors would never know. Moments in a world without nets—none to catch you and none to envelop you. Joe looked at Dion and recalled what he’d felt after the first time they’d knocked over that newsstand on Bowdoin Street when they were thirteen years old: We will probably die young .

But how many men, as they stepped into the night country of their own final hour and crossed dark fields toward the fog bank of whatever world lay beyond this one, could take one last look over their shoulders and say, I once sabotaged a ten-thousand-ton transport ship ?

Joe met Dion’s eyes again and chuckled.

“He never came back out.” Graciela stood beside him, looking at the ship, which was now almost completely obscured by the smoke.

Joe said nothing.

“Manny,” she said, though she didn’t have to.

Joe nodded.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said, but what he thought was: I certainly hope so.

At dawn, the sailors off-loaded the weapons and placed them on the pier. The crates sat in the rising sun, beaded with dew that turned to steam as it evaporated. Several smaller boats arrived, and sailors got off them followed by officers, and they all took a look at the hole in the hull. Joe, Esteban, and Dion wandered among the crowd behind the cordons set up by the Tampa Police and heard that the ship had settled at the bottom of the bay and there was some question as to whether she could be salvaged. The navy was purportedly sending a crane on a barge down from Jacksonville to answer that question. As for the weapons, they were looking into getting a ship to Tampa that could handle the load. In the meantime, they’d have to stow them someplace.

Joe walked back off the pier. He met Graciela at a café on Ninth. They sat outdoors under a stone portico and watched a streetcar clack along the tracks in the center of the avenue and come to a stop in front of them. A few passengers got on, a few got off, and the streetcar rattled away again.