Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

The panther licked its upper lip and nose.

It yawned, and Joe wanted to close his eyes in the face of those magnificent teeth, the white of every bone they’d ever cracked in half and torn the meat from.

The mouth closed and the yellow eyes found him again and the cat placed its front paws on his stomach and walked up his body to his head.

Graciela said, “What cat?”

He stared up into her face, blinking at the sweat. It was morning; the air coming through the windows was cool and bore the scent of camellias.

After the surgeries, he was also prohibited from having sex for three months. Alcohol, Cuban food, shellfish, nuts, and corn were forbidden. If he feared that the lack of lovemaking would drive him and Graciela apart (and he did; so did she), it actually had the opposite effect. By the second month, he learned a different way to satisfy her, using his mouth, a way he’d stumbled upon by accident a few times over the years, but which now became his sole method of giving her pleasure. Kneeling before her, her ass cupped in his hands, his mouth covering the gateway to her womb, a gateway he’d come to think of as sacred and sinful and luxuriously slippery all at the same time, he felt he’d finally found something worth taking a knee for. If surrendering all preconceived notions of what a man was expected to give and receive from a woman was what it took to feel as pure and useful as he felt with his head between Graciela’s thighs, then he wished he’d lost those notions years ago. Her initial protestations— no, you can’t; a man does not do that; I must bathe; you cannot possibly like the taste —gave way to something bordering on addiction. For the final month before she could return the favor, Joe realized they were averaging five acts of oral gratification a day.

When the doctors finally cleared him, he and Graciela closed the shutters of their home on Ninth and filled the icebox on the second floor with food and champagne and confined themselves to the canopy bed or the claw-foot tub for two days. Near the end of the second day, lying in the red dusk, the shutters reopened to the street, the ceiling fan drying their bodies, Graciela said, “There will never be another.”

“What’s that?”

“Man.” She ran her palm over his patchwork abdomen. “You are my man until death.”

“Yeah?”

She pressed her open mouth to his neck and exhaled. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“What about Adan?”

For the first time he saw contempt enter her eyes at the mention of her husband.

“Adan is no man. You, mi gran amor, are a man.”

“You’re certainly all woman,” he said. “Christ, I get so lost in you.”

“I get lost in you.”

“Well, then…” He looked around the room. He’d waited so long for this day, he wasn’t sure how to treat it now that it had arrived. “You’ll never get a divorce in Cuba, right?”

She shook her head. “Even if I could return under my own name, the Church does not allow it.”

“So you’ll always be married to him.”

“In name,” she said.

“But what’s a name?” he said.

She laughed. “Agreed.”

He moved her on top of him and looked up her brown body into her brown eyes. “Tú eres mi esposa.”

She wiped at her eyes with both hands, a small wet laugh escaping her. “And you are my husband.”

“Para siempre.”

She placed her warm palms on his chest and nodded. “Forever.”

Business continued to boom.

Joe began greasing the skids on the Ritz deal. John Ringling was open to selling the building but not the land. So Joe had his lawyers work with Ringling’s to see if they could reach an accommodation that would suit both. Lately the two sides had investigated a ninety-nine-year lease but had gotten hung up on air rights with the county. Joe had one set of bagmen buying the inspectors in Sarasota County, another set up in Tallahassee working on state politicians, and a third group in Washington targeting members of the IRS and senators who frequented whorehouses, gambling parlors, and opium dens the Pescatore Family had stakes in.

His earliest success was to get bingo decriminalized in Pinellas County. He then got a statewide bingo decriminalization bill on the docket, to be heard by the state legislature in the autumn session and possibly put on the ballot as early as 1932. His friends in Miami, a much easier town to buy, helped soften the state even further when Dade and Broward Counties legalized pari-mutuel betting. Joe and Esteban had crawled out on a limb to buy up land for their Miami friends, and now that land was being turned into racetracks.

Maso had flown down to take a look at the Ritz. He’d survived a bout with cancer recently, though no one but Maso and his doctors knew what kind. He claimed to have come through it with flying colors, though it had left him bald and frail. Some even whispered that his thinking had grown muddy, though Joe saw no evidence of it. He’d loved the property and he’d liked Joe’s logic—if there was ever a time to strike at the gambling taboos, it was now, as Prohibition tragically collapsed before their eyes. The money they’d lose on the legalization of booze would go right into the government’s pocket, but the money they’d lose on legal casino and racetrack taxation would be offset by the profit they’d make from people dumb enough to bet against the house on a mass scale.

The bagmen also began to report back that Joe’s hunch was looking good. The country was soft enough for this. You had cash-strapped municipalities from one end of Florida to the other and one end of the country to the other. Joe had sent his men out with pledges of infinite dividends—a casino tax, a hotel tax, a food and beverage tax, an entertainment tax, a room tax, a liquor license tax, plus—and all the pols loved this one—an excess revenue tax. If, on any given day, the casino cleared more than eight hundred thousand dollars, the casino would kick 2 percent of it back to the state. Truth was, any time the casino came close to clearing eight hundred large, they’d skim the take blind. But the politicians with their small plates and their big eyes didn’t need to know that.

By late ’31, he had two junior senators, nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four senior senators, thirteen county representatives, eleven city councillors, and two judges in his pocket. He’d also bought off his old KKK rival, Hopper Hewitt, editor of the Tampa Examiner, who’d begun running editorials and hard news stories that questioned the logic of allowing so many people to starve when a first-class casino on Florida’s Gulf Coast could put them all to work, which would give them the money to buy up all those foreclosed houses, which would need lawyers to come off the breadlines to do the closings proper, who would need clerical staff to make sure it was written up nice.

As Joe drove him to his train for the return journey, Maso said, “Whatever you need to do on this, you do.”

“Thanks,” Joe said, “I will.”

“You’ve done some real good work down here.” Maso patted his knee. “Don’t think it won’t be taken into consideration.”

Joe didn’t know what his work could be “taken into consideration” for. He’d built something down here out of the mud, and Maso was talking to him like he’d found him a new grocer to shake down. Maybe there was something to those rumors about the old man’s thinking of late.

“Oh,” Maso said as they neared Union Station, “I heard you still got a rogue out there. That true?”

It took Joe a few seconds. “You mean that ’shiner won’t pay his dues?”