Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“You’ve got a very confused woman on your hands,” he told Joe after his last trip over.

“This I know,” Joe said.

“Do you understand why she is confused?”

Joe poured them each a glass of Suarez Reserve. “No, I don’t. We can buy or do anything we want. She can have the finest clothes, get her hair done at the nicest shops, go to the nicest restaurants—”

“That allow Latins.”

“That goes without saying.”

“Does it?” Esteban leaned forward in his chair, put his feet on the floor.

“The point I’m trying to make,” Joe said, “is that we won. We can relax, she and I. Grow old together.”

“And you think that’s what she wants—to be a rich man’s wife?”

“Isn’t that what most women want?”

Esteban gave that a strange smile. “You told me once you did not grow up poor like most gangsters.”

Joe nodded. “We weren’t rich but…”

“But you had a nice house, food in your bellies, could afford to go to school.”

“Yes.”

“And was your mother happy?”

Joe said nothing for a long time.

“I’ll assume that’s a no,” Esteban said.

Eventually Joe said, “My parents seemed more like distant cousins. Graciela and me? We’re not those people. We talk all the time. We”—he lowered his voice—“fuck all the time. We truly enjoy each other’s company.”

“So?”

“So why won’t she love me?”

Esteban laughed. “Of course she loves you.”

“She won’t say it.”

“Who cares if she says it?”

“I do,” Joe said. “And she won’t divorce Shithead.”

“I can’t speak to that,” Esteban said. “I could live a thousand years and never understand the hold that pendejo has over her.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Every time I walk down the worst block in Old Havana he sits there in one of the bars, drinking her money.”

My money, Joe thought. Mine.

“Is anyone still looking for her over there?”

“Her name’s on a list,” Esteban said.

Joe thought about it. “But I could get her false papers in a fortnight. Couldn’t I?”

Esteban nodded. “Of course. Maybe sooner.”

“So I could send her back there, she could see this asshole sitting on his barstool, and she’d… She’d what, Esteban? You think it would be enough for her to leave him?”

He shrugged. “Joseph, listen to me. She loves you. I have known her all my life and I have seen her in love before. But you? Whoosh.” He widened his eyes, fanned his face with his hat. “It’s something different than she’s ever felt. But you must remember, she’s spent the last ten years defining herself as a revolutionary, and now she wakes up to discover that what she really wants is to throw all that off her shoulders—her beliefs, her country, her calling, and, yes, her stupid old husband—to be with an American gangster. You think she’s just going to admit that to herself?”

“Why not?”

“Because then she has to admit she’s a café rebel, a fake. She’s not going to admit that. She’s going to redouble her commitment to the cause and hold you at arm’s length.” He shook his head and grew thoughtful, staring up at the ceiling. “When you say it out loud, it’s quite mad actually.”

Joe rubbed his face. “You got that right.”

Everything hummed along smoothly for a couple years—a hell of a run in their business—until Robert Drew Pruitt came to town.

The Monday after Joe’s talk with Esteban, Dion came in to tell him that RD had stuck up another of their clubs. Robert Drew Pruitt was called RD, and he’d been a concern to everyone in Ybor since he’d gotten out of prison eight weeks ago and showed up here to make his way in the world.

“Why can’t we just find this asshole and put him down?”

“The Klavern ain’t going to like that.”

The KKK had gained a lot of power in Tampa recently. They’d always been fanatic drys, not because they didn’t drink themselves—they did, and constantly—but because they believed alcohol gave delusions of power to the mud people and led to fornication between the races and was also part of a papist plot to sow weakness in the practitioners of true religion so Catholics could eventually take over the world.

The Klan had left Ybor alone until the crash. Once the economy went in the tank, their message of white power began to find desperate believers, the same way the fire-and-brimstone preachers had seen attendance in their tents swell. People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn’t reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.

They found it in the cigar workers, who had a long history of labor battles and radical thought. The Klan ended the last strike. Every time the strikers gathered, the KKK would bust into the meetings firing rifles and pistol-whipping whoever was in reach. They burned a cross on one striker’s lawn, firebombed the house of another on Seventeenth, and raped two female cigar workers walking home from the Celestino Vega factory.

The strike was called off.

RD Pruitt had been Klan before he left to do a two-year bid at the State Prison Farm at Raiford, so there was little reason to believe he hadn’t joined right back up when he got out. The first speak he stuck up, a hole-in-the-wall in the back of a bodega on Twenty-seventh, was directly across the train tracks from an old shotgun shack rumored to be the headquarters for the local Klavern run by Kelvin Beauregard. As RD was helping himself to the night’s till, he gestured at the wall closest to the tracks and said, “We all be watching so we best not see no laws.”

When Joe heard that, he knew he was dealing with a moron—who the fuck would call the police when a speakeasy was robbed? But the “we” gave him pause because the Klan were just waiting for someone like Joe to stick his head up. A Catholic Yankee who worked with the Latins, Italians, and Negroes, shacked up with a Cuban, and made his money selling the demon rum—what wasn’t there to hate about him?

In fact, he realized pretty quickly, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were calling him out. The foot soldiers of the Klan might have been a collection of inbred idiots with fourth-grade educations at third-rate schools, but their leaders tended to be a bit smarter. Besides Kelvin Beauregard, a local cannery owner and city councilman, the group was rumored to include Judge Franklin of the 13th Judicial Court, a dozen cops, and even Hopper Hewitt, publisher of the Tampa Examiner.

The other, far more meaningful complication, in Joe’s view, was that RD’s brother-in-law was Irving Figgis, also known as Eagle Eye Irv, but more formally as Tampa’s chief of police.

Since their first meeting back in ’29, Chief Figgis had brought Joe in for questioning a few times, just to keep clear the adversarial nature of their relationship. Joe would sit in his office and sometimes Irv would have his secretary bring them lemonade, and Joe would look at the pictures on his desk—the beautiful wife, and the two apple-haired children, the boy, Caleb, a dead ringer for his daddy, and the girl, Loretta, still so beautiful it muddied Joe’s brain whenever he looked at her. She’d been homecoming queen at Hillsborough High School and had been winning all sorts of awards in local theater since she was a pup. So no one was surprised when she headed west for Hollywood upon graduation. Like everyone else, Joe expected to see her up on the big screen any day now. She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths.

Surrounded by the images of his perfect life, Irv had warned Joe on more than one occasion that if his department ever found anything to tie him to the Mercy job, they’d damn well rope Joe up for the rest of his life. And who knew what the Feds would do from there—maybe tie that rope around his neck, drop him through the gallows. But otherwise, Irv let Joe and Esteban and their people be, as long as they all stayed the hell out of white Tampa.