Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“That’s true,” Joe said. “I got no excuse.”

“No, you don’t,” Luciano said. He looked across the desk at Dion. “What would you have done with the ’shiner?”

Dion looked uncertainly at Joe.

“Don’t you look at him,” Luciano said. “You look at me and you tell me straight.”

But Dion continued to look at Joe until Joe said, “Tell him the truth, D.”

Dion turned to Lucky. “I would have turned out his fucking lights, Mr. Luciano. His sons’ too.” He snapped his fingers. “Taken out the whole family.”

“And the Holy Roller dame?”

“Her I would have disappeared-like.”

“Why?”

“Give her people the option of turning her into a saint. They can tell themselves she’s immaculately concepted up to heaven, whatever. Meanwhile, they’d damn well know we chopped her up and fed her to the reptiles, so they’d never fuck with us again, but the rest of the time, they’d gather in her name and sing her praises.”

Luciano said, “You’re the one Pescatore said was a rat.”

“Yup.”

“Never made sense to us.” He said to Joe, “Why would you knowingly trust a rat who sent you up the river for two years?”

Joe said, “I wouldn’t.”

Luciano nodded. “That’s what we thought when we tried to talk the old man out of the hit.”

“But you sanctioned it.”

“We sanctioned it if you refused to use our trucks and our unions in your new liquor business.”

“Maso never brought that up to me.”

“No?”

“No, sir. He just said I was going to take orders from his son and I had to kill my friend.”

Luciano stared at him for a long time.

“All right,” he said eventually, “make your proposal.”

“Make him boss.” Joe jerked his thumb at Dion.

Dion said, “What?”

Luciano smiled for the first time. “And you’ll stay on as consigliere ?”

“Yes.”

Dion said, “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”

Luciano looked at him and the smile died on his face.

Dion read the tea leaves fast. “I’d be honored.”

Luciano said, “Where you from?”

“Town called Manganaro in Sicily.”

Luciano’s eyebrows rose. “I’m from Lercara Friddi.”

“Oh,” Dion said. “The big town.”

Luciano came around the desk. “You gotta be from a real shithole like Manganaro to call Lercara Friddi the ‘big town.’ ”

Dion nodded. “That’s why we left.”

“When was that? Stand up.”

Dion stood. “I was eight.”

“Been back?”

“Why would I go back ?” Dion said.

“It’ll remind you of who you are. Not who you pretend to be. Who you are .” He put an arm around Dion’s shoulders. “And you’re a boss.” He pointed at Joe. “And he’s a brain. Let’s go have some lunch. I know a great place a few blocks from here. Best gravy in the city.”

They left the office, and four men fell in around them as they headed for the elevator.

“Joe,” Lucky said, “I need to introduce you to my friend, Meyer. He’s got some great ideas about casinos in Florida and in Cuba.” Now Luciano put his arm around Joe. “You know much about Cuba?”

When Joe Coughlin met up with Emma Gould in Havana in the late spring of 1935, it had been nine years since the speakeasy robbery in South Boston. He remembered how cool she’d been that morning, how unflappable, and how those qualities had unnerved him. He’d then mistaken being unnerved for being smitten and mistook being smitten for being in love.

He and Graciela had been in Cuba almost a year, staying at first in the guesthouse of one of Esteban’s coffee plantations high in the hills of Las Terrazas, about fifty miles west of Havana. In the morning they woke to the smell of coffee beans and cocoa leaves while mist ticked and dripped off the trees. In the evenings, they walked the foothills while rags of fading sunlight clung to the thick treetops.

Graciela’s mother and sister visited one weekend and never left. Tomas, not even crawling when they’d arrived, took his first step late in his tenth month. The women spoiled him shamelessly and fed him to the point he turned into a ball with thick, wrinkly thighs. But once he began to walk, he quickly began to run. He would run through the fields and up and down the slopes, and the women would chase him so that very soon he was not a ball but a slim boy with his father’s light hair but his mother’s dark eyes and skin that was a cocoa-butter combination of them both.

Joe made a few trips back to Tampa on the tin goose, a Ford Trimotor 5-AT that rattled in the wind and lurched and dipped without warning. He exited a couple of times with his ears so blocked he couldn’t hear the rest of the day. The air nurses gave him gum to chew and cotton to stuff in there, but it was still a primitive way to travel and Graciela wanted no part of it. So he would make the trip without her and find that he missed her and Tomas at a physical level. He would wake in the middle of the night at their house in Ybor with stomach pain so sharp it stole his breath.

As soon as his business was concluded he’d take the first plane he could get down to Miami. Take the next available one out of there.

It wasn’t that Graciela didn’t want to return to Tampa—she did. She just didn’t want to fly there. And she didn’t want to return right now. (Which, Joe suspected, meant she really didn’t want to go back.) So they stayed in the hills of Las Terrazas, and her mother and sister, Benita, were joined by a third sister, Ines. Whatever bad blood had existed between Graciela, her mother, Benita, and Ines looked to have been healed by time and the presence of Tomas. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, Joe followed the sound of their laughter to catch them dressing Tomas like a girl.

One morning Graciela asked if they could buy a place here.

“Here?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be right here. But in Cuba,” she said. “Just a place we could visit.”

“We’d be ‘visiting’?” Joe smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I must get back to work soon.”

She didn’t really. On his trips back, Joe had checked in on the people in whose care she’d left her various charities, and they were all trustworthy men and women. She could stay away from Ybor for a decade and all her organizations would still be standing, hell, flourishing, when she returned.

“Sure, doll. Whatever you want.”

“It wouldn’t have to be a big place. Or a fancy place. Or a—”

“Graciela,” Joe said, “pick whatever you want. You see something and it’s not for sale? Offer them double.”

Not unheard of in those days. Cuba, hit by the Depression worse than most countries, was taking tentative steps toward recovery. The abuses of the Machado regime had been replaced by the hope of Colonel Fulgencio Batista, leader of the Sergeants Revolt that had sent Machado packing. The official president of the Republic was Carlos Mendieta, but everyone knew Batista and his army ran the show. So favored was this arrangement, the American government had started pouring money into the island five minutes after the revolt that put Machado on a plane to Miami. Money for hospitals and roads and museums and schools and a new commercial district along the Malecón. Colonel Batista not only loved the American government, but he also loved the American gambler, so Joe, Dion, Meyer Lansky, and Esteban Suarez, among others, had full access to the highest offices in government. They’d already purchased ninety-nine-year leases on some of the best land along the Parque Central and in the Tacon Market district.