Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

  Dion opened the door for him and Joe climbed inside.

  Chapter Twelve

  Music and Guns

  Joe had asked Maso to put him up in a hotel. His first month here, he didn’t want to think about anything but business—that included where his next meal was coming from, how his sheets and clothes got washed, and how long the fella who’d gotten to the bathroom ahead of him was going to stay there. Maso said he’d put him up at the Tampa Bay Hotel, which sounded fine to Joe, if a little unimaginative. He assumed it was a middle-of-the-road place with decent beds, bland but serviceable food, and flat pillows.

  Instead, Dion pulled up in front of a lakefront palace. When Joe spoke the thought aloud, Dion said, “That’s actually what they call it—Plant’s Palace.” Henry Plant had built the place, much like he’d built most of Florida, to entice land speculators who’d come down over the past two decades in swarms.

  Before Dion could pull up to the front door, a train crossed their path. Not a toy train, though he’d bet they had those here too, but a transcontinental locomotive, a quarter mile long. Joe and Dion sat just short of the parking lot and watched the train disgorge rich men and rich women and their rich children. While they waited, Joe counted more than a hundred windows in the building. At the top of the redbrick walls were several dormers Joe assumed housed the suites. Six minarets rose even higher than the dormers, pointing toward the hard white sky—a Russian winter palace in the middle of dredged Florida swampland.

  A swank couple in starched whites left the train. Their three nannies and three swank children followed. Fast on their heels two Negro porters pushed luggage carts piled high with steamer trunks.

  “Let’s come back,” Joe said.

  “What?” Dion said. “We can park here and walk your bags over. Get you—”

  “We’ll come back.” Joe watched the couple stroll inside like they’d grown up in places twice this size. “I don’t want to wait in line.”

  Dion looked like he was about to say more on the subject, but then he sighed softly, and they drove back down the road and over small wooden bridges and past a golf course. An older couple sat in a rickshaw pulled by a small Latin guy in a white long-sleeve shirt and white pants. Small wooden signs pointed to the shuffleboard courts, the hunting preserve, canoes, tennis courts, and a racetrack. They drove past the golf course, greener than Joe would have bet in all this heat, and most people they saw wore white and carried parasols, even the men, and their laughter was dry and distant on the air.

  He and Dion drove onto Lafayette and into downtown. Dion told Joe the Suarezes went back and forth from Cuba and few knew much about them. Ivelia, it was rumored, had been married to a man who’d died during the sugar workers’ rebellion back in ’12. It was also rumored that the story was a front to disguise her lesbian tendencies.

  “Esteban,” Dion said, “owns a lot of companies, both here and over there. Young guy, way younger than his sister. But smart. His father was in business with Ybor himself when Ybor—”

  “Wait a minute,” Joe said, “this city’s named after one guy?”

  “Yeah,” Dion said, “Vicente Ybor. He was a cigar guy.”

  “Now, that,” Joe said, “is power.” He looked out the window and saw Ybor City to the east, handsome from a distance, reminding Joe again of New Orleans, but a much smaller version.

  “I dunno,” Dion said, “Coughlin City?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t have a ring to it.”

  “No,” Joe agreed, “but Coughlin County?”

  Dion chuckled. “You know? That’s not bad.”

  “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  “How many sizes your hat go up when you were in prison?” Dion asked.

  “Suit yourself,” Joe said, “dream small.”

  “How about Coughlin Country? No, hold it, Coughlin Conti-nent.”

  Joe laughed and Dion roared and slapped the wheel and Joe was surprised to realize how much he’d missed his friend and how much it would break his heart if he had to order his murder by the end of the week.

  Dion drove them down Jefferson toward the courthouses and government buildings. They ran into a snarl of traffic and the heat found the car again.

  “Next on the agenda?” Joe asked.

  “You want heroin? Morphine? Cocaine?”

  Joe shook his head. “Gave them all up for Lent.”

  Dion said, “Well, if you ever decide to get hooked, this is the place to come, sport. Tampa, Florida—illegal narcotics center of the South.”

  “Chamber of commerce know that?”

  “And they’re plenty sore about it. Anyway, reason I bring it up is—”

  “Oh, a point,” Joe said.

  “I do have them now and again.”

  “By all means then, proceed, sir.”

  “One of Esteban’s guys, Arturo Torres? He was pinched last week for cocaine. So normally he’d be out half an hour after he went in, but they got this Federal task force sniffing around right now. IRS guys came down beginning of the summer with a bunch of judges, and the furnace got turned on. Arturo is going to be deported.”

  “Why do we care?”

  “He’s Esteban’s best cooker. ’Round Ybor you see a bottle of rum with Torres’s initials on the cork, it’s gonna cost you double.”

  “When’s he supposed to be deported?”

  “In about two hours.”

  Joe placed his hat over his face and slouched in his seat. He felt exhausted suddenly from the long train ride, the heat, the thinking, that dizzying display of wealthy white people in their wealthy white clothes. “Wake me when we get there.”

  After meeting with the judge, they walked from the courthouse to pay a courtesy call on Chief Irving Figgis of the Tampa Police Department.

  Headquarters sat on the corner of Florida and Jackson, Joe having oriented himself enough to realize he’d have to pass by it every day as he went from the hotel to work in Ybor. Cops were like nuns that way—always letting you know they were watching.

  “He asked you to come to him,” Dion explained as they walked up the steps of headquarters, “so he won’t have to come to you.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s a copper,” Dion said, “so he’s an asshole. Beyond that, he’s okay.”

  In his office, Figgis was surrounded by photographs of the same three people—a wife, a son, and a daughter. They were all apple-haired and startlingly attractive. The children had skin so unblemished it was as if angels had scrubbed them clean. The chief shook Joe’s hand, looked him directly in the eye, and asked him to take a seat. Irving Figgis wasn’t a tall man or one of great size or muscle. He was slim and ran small and kept his gray hair trimmed tight to his scalp. He looked like a man who’d give you a fair shake if you gave the same to him, but a man who’d give you twice the hell you’d come looking for if you played him for a fool.

  “I won’t insult you by asking the nature of your business,” he said, “so you won’t have to insult me by lying. Fair?”

  Joe nodded.

  “True you’re a police captain’s son?”

  Joe nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “So you understand.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “That this”—he pointed back and forth between his chest and Joe’s—“is how we live. But everything else?” He gestured at all those photographs. “Well, that’s why we live.”

  Joe nodded. “And never the twain shall meet.”

  Chief Figgis smiled. “Heard you were educated too.” A small glance for Dion. “Don’t find much of that in your trade.”

  “Or in yours,” Dion said.

  Figgis smiled and tipped his head in acknowledgment. He fixed Joe in a mild gaze. “Before I settled here, I was a soldier and then a U.S. marshal. I’ve killed seven men in my lifetime,” he said without a hint
of pride.

  Seven? Joe thought. Christ.

  Chief Figgis’s gaze remained mild, even. “I killed them because it was my job. I take no pleasure from it and, truth be told, their faces haunt me most nights. But if I had to kill an eighth tomorrow to protect and serve this city? Mister, I would do so with a steady arm and a clear eye. You follow?”

  “I do,” Joe said.

  Chief Figgis stood by a city map on the wall behind his desk and used his finger to draw a slow circle around Ybor City. “If you keep your business here—north of Second, south of Twenty-seventh, west of Thirty-fourth, and east of Nebraska—you and I will have little in the way of discord.” He gave Joe a small arch of his eyebrow. “How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good,” Joe said, wondering when he’d get around to naming his price.

  Chief Figgis saw the question in Joe’s eyes and his own darkened slightly. “I don’t take bribes. If I did, three of those seven dead I mentioned would still be among the living.” He came around to sit on the edge of the desk, spoke in a very low voice. “I have no illusions, young Mr. Coughlin, on how business is transacted in this town. If you were to ask me in private how I feel about Volstead, you’d see me do a pretty fair imitation of a kettle come to boil. I know plenty of my officers take money to look the other way. I know I serve a city swimming in corruption. I know we live in a fallen world. But just because I breathe corrupt air and rub elbows with corrupt people, never make the mistake of believing I am corruptible.”

  Joe searched the man’s face for signs of puffery, pride, or self-aggrandizement—the usual weaknesses he’d come to associate with “self-made” men.

  Nothing stared back at him but quiet fortitude.

  Chief Figgis, he decided, was never to be underestimated.

  “I won’t make that mistake,” Joe said.

  Chief Figgis held out his hand and Joe shook it.

  “I thank you for coming by. Careful in the sun.” A flash of humor passed through Figgis’s face. “That skin of yours could catch fire, I suspect.”

  “A pleasure meeting you, Chief.”

  Joe went to the door. Dion opened it, and a teenage girl, all breathless energy, stood on the other side. It was the daughter in all the photographs, beautiful and apple-haired, rose gold skin so unblemished it achieved a soft-sun radiance. Joe guessed she was seventeen. Her beauty found his throat, stopped it for a moment, put a catch in the words about to leave his mouth, so all he could manage was a hesitant, “Miss . . .” Yet it wasn’t a beauty that evoked anything carnal in him. It was somehow purer than that. The beauty of Chief Irving Figgis’s daughter wasn’t something you wanted to despoil, it was something you wanted to beatify.

  “Father,” she said, “I apologize. I thought you were alone.”

  “That’s all right, Loretta. These gentlemen were leaving. Your manners,” he said.

  “Yes, Father, I’m sorry.” She turned and gave Joe and Dion a small curtsy. “Miss Loretta Figgis, gentlemen.”

  “Joe Coughlin, Miss Loretta. Pleased to meet you.”

  When Joe lightly shook her hand, he felt the strangest urge to genuflect. It stayed with him all afternoon, how pristine she was, how delicate, and how hard it must be to parent something so fragile.

  Later that evening, they ate dinner at Vedado Tropicale at a table off to the right of the stage, which gave them a perfect view of the dancers and the band. It was early so the band—a drummer, piano player, trumpeter, and slide trombonist—kept it peppy but didn’t go full bore yet. The dancers wore little more than shifts, pale as ice, the color matching their headgear, which varied. A couple of them wore sequined bandeaux with aigrettes arching out from the center of their foreheads. Others wore silver hairnets with frosted bead rosettes and fringe. They danced with one hand on their hips and one raised to the air or pointing out at the audience. They gave the dinner crowd just enough flesh and gyrations not to offend the missus but to guarantee the mister would return at a later hour.

  Joe asked Dion if their dinner was the best in the city.

  Dion smiled around a forkful of lechon asado and fried yucca. “In the country.”

  Joe smiled. “It’s not bad, I gotta say.” Joe had ordered ropa vieja with black beans and yellow rice. He wiped the plate clean and wished the plate was bigger.

  The maître d’ came over and informed them that their coffee was waiting with their hosts. Joe and Dion followed the man across the white tile floor, past the stage, and through a dark velvet curtain. They went down a corridor the cherry oak of rum casks, and Joe wondered if they’d brought a few hundred of them across the Gulf just to make this hallway. They would have had to bring more than a few hundred, actually, because the office was constructed of the same wood.

  It was cool in there. The floor was dark stone, and iron ceiling fans hung from the crossbeams, clacking and creaking. The slats of the honey-colored plantation shutters were open to the evening and the infinite hum of dragonflies.

  Esteban Suarez was a slim man with unblemished skin the color of weak tea. His eyes were the pale yellow of a cat’s and his hair, slicked back off his forehead, was the color of the dark rum in the bottle on his coffee table. He wore a dinner jacket and black silk bow tie and he came to them with a bright smile and a vigorous handshake. He led them to high wingback armchairs that had been arranged around a copper coffee table. On the table were four tiny cups of Cuban coffee, four water glasses, and the bottle of Suarez Reserve Rum in a weave basket.

  Esteban’s sister, Ivelia, rose from her seat and extended her hand. Joe bowed, took her hand, and brushed it lightly with his lips. Her skin smelled of ginger and sawdust. She was much older than her brother, with tight skin over a long jaw and sharp cheekbones and brow. Her thick eyebrows rolled together like a silkworm and her wide eyes seemed trapped in her skull, bulging to escape but helpless to do so.

  “How were your meals?” Esteban asked when they sat.

  “Excellent,” Joe said. “Thank you.”

  Esteban poured them glasses of rum and raised his in toast. “To a fruitful relationship.”

  They drank. Joe was stunned by how smooth and rich it was. This is what liquor tasted like when you had more than an hour to distill it, more than a week to ferment it. Christ.

  “This is exceptional.”

  “It’s the fifteen-year,” Esteban said. “I never agreed with the Spanish mandate from the old days that lighter rum was superior.” He shook his head at the notion and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Of course, we Cubans went along because of our belief that lighter is better in all things—hair, skin, eyes.”

  The Suarezes were light-skinned themselves, descended from the Spanish strain, not the African.

  “Yes,” Esteban said, reading Joe’s thought. “My sister and I aren’t of the lesser classes. That doesn’t mean we agree with the social order of our island.”

  He took another sip of rum and Joe did the same.

  Dion said, “Be nice if we could sell this up north.”

  Ivelia laughed. It was very sharp and very short. “Someday. When your government treats you like adults again.”

  “No rush,” Joe said. “We’d all be out of a job.”

  Esteban said, “My sister and I would be fine. We have this restaurant and two in Havana and one in Key West. We have a sugar plantation in Cárdenas and a coffee plantation in Marianao.”

  “So why do this at all?”

  Esteban shrugged in his perfect dinner jacket. “Money.”

  “More money, you mean.”

  He raised his glass to that. “There are other things to spend money on besides”—he waved his arm at the room—“things.”

  “So says the man with a lot of things,” Dion said, and Joe shot him a look.

  Joe noticed for the first time that the west wall of the office was given over entirely to black-and-whi
te photographs—street scenes mostly, the facades of nightclubs, a few faces, a couple of villages so dilapidated they’d fall over in the next wind.

  Ivelia followed his gaze. “My brother takes them.”

  Joe said, “Yeah?”

  Esteban nodded. “On my trips home. It’s a hobby.”

  “A hobby,” his sister said with a scoff. “My brother’s photographs have been published in Time magazine.”

  Esteban gave it all a diffident shrug.

  “They’re good,” Joe said.

  “Someday maybe I’ll photograph you, Mr. Coughlin.”

  Joe shook his head. “I’m with the Indians on that one, I’m afraid.”

  Esteban gave that a wry smile. “Speaking of captured souls, I was sorry to hear of the passing of Senor Ormino last night.”

  “Were you?” Dion asked.

  Esteban gave that a chuckle so soft it was almost indistinguishable from an exhaled breath. “And friends tell me Gary L. Smith was last seen on the Seaboard Limited with his wife in one Pullman and his puta maestra in another. They say his luggage looked hastily packed but there was a lot of it.”

  “Sometimes a change of scenery gives a man a new lease on life,” Joe said.

  “Is that the case with you?” Ivelia asked. “Have you come to Ybor for a new life?”

  “I’ve come to refine, distill, and distribute the demon rum. But I’m going to have trouble doing that successfully with an erratic import schedule.”

  “We don’t control every skiff, every tariff officer, every dock,” Esteban said.

  “Sure you do.”

  “We don’t control the tides.”

  “The tides haven’t slowed the boats to Miami.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with boats to Miami.”

  “I know.” Joe nodded. “Nestor Famosa does. And he assured my associates that the seas this summer have been calm and predictable. I understand Nestor Famosa is a man of his word.”

  “By which you imply I’m not.” Esteban poured them all another glass of rum. “You also bring up Senor Famosa so that I will worry he could overtake my supply routes if you and I aren’t in accord.”