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.
Chapter Fifteen
His Daughter’s Eyes
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.
“Did you see any sign of him?” Graciela asked.
Joe shook his head. “But Dion’s watching. And he put a couple of his guys in the crowd, so . . .” He shrugged and sipped his Cuban coffee. He’d been up all night and hadn’t slept much the previous night, but as long as the Cuban coffee kept coming, he assumed he could stay awake for a week.
“What do they put in this stuff? Cocaine?”
Graciela said, “It’s just coffee.”
“That’s like saying vodka is just potato juice.” He finished it and returned the cup to the saucer. “Do you miss it?”
“Cuba?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “Very much.”
“Then why are you here?”
She looked off at the street as if she could see Havana on the other side of it. “You don’t like the heat.”
“What?”
“You,” she said. “You are always waving your hand at the air, your hat. I see you make faces and look up at the sun, as if you want to tell it to set faster.”
“I didn’t realize it was that obvious.”
“You’re doing it now.”
She was right. He’d been waving his hat by the side of his head. “This kinda heat? Some people would say it’s like living on the sun. I say it’s like living in the sun. Christ. How do you people function down here?”
She leaned back in her chair, lovely brown neck arching against the wrought iron. “It can never get too warm for me.”
“Then you’re insane.”
She laughed and he watched the laugh run up her throat. She closed her eyes. “So you hate the heat but you are here.”
“Yes.”
She opened her eyes, tilted her head, looked at him. “Why?”
He suspected—no, he knew—that what he’d felt for Emma was love. It was love. So the feeling Graciela Corrales stirred in him had to be lust. But a lust unlike any he’d ever encountered. Had he ever seen eyes that dark? There was something so languid in everything she did—from walking, to smoking her cigars, to picking up a pencil—that it was easy to imagine that languid motion in play as her body draped over his, took him inside her while she exhaled a long breath into his ear. The languor in her didn’t resemble laziness but precision. Time didn’t bend it; it bent time to uncoil as she desired.
No wonder the nuns had railed so vehemently against the sins of lust and covetousness. They could possess you surer than a cancer. Kill you twice as quick.
“Why?” he said, not even sure where he was in the conversation for a moment.
She was looking at him curiously. “Yes, why?”
“A job,” he said.
“I come for the same reason.”
“To roll cigars?”
She straightened in her chair and nodded. “The pay is much better than anything in Havana. I send it home to family, most of it. When my husband is released, we will decide where to live.”
“Oh,” Joe said, “you’re married.”
“Yes.”
He saw a flash of triumph in her eyes, or did he imagine it?
“But your husband’s in prison.”
Another nod. “But not for what you do.”
“What do I do?”
She waved at the air. “Little dirty crimes.”
“Oh, that’s what I do.” He nodded. “I’d been wondering.”
“Adan fights for something bigger than himself.”
“What kinda sentence they hand out for that?”
Her face darkened, the joking over. “He was tortured to tell them who his accomplices were—myself and Esteban. But he did not tell them. No matter what they did to him.” Her jaw was extended, her eyes flashing in a way that reminded Joe of the slim bolts of lightning they’d seen last night. “I don’t send money home to my family because I don’t have a family. I send it to Adan’s family so they can get him out of that shithole prison and home to me.”
Was it just lust he felt or something he hadn’t been able to define yet? Maybe it was his exhaustion and two years in prison and the heat. Maybe so. Probably so. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was drawn to a part of her he suspected was deeply broken, something frightened and angry and hopeful all at the same time. Something at her core that struck at something at his.
“He’s a lucky man,” Joe said.
Her mouth opened before she realized there was nothing to retort to.
“A very lucky man.” Joe stood and placed some coins on the table. “Time to make that phone call.”
They made the call from a phone in the back of a bankrupt cigar factory on the east side of Ybor. They sat on a dusty floor in the empty office and Joe dialed while Graciela took one last glance over the message he’d typed up last night around midnight.
“City desk,” the guy on the other end said, and Joe handed the phone to Graciela.
Graciela said, “I take responsibility for last night’s triumph over American imperialism. You know of the bombing of the USS Mercy?”
Joe could hear the guy’s voice. “Yes, yes, I do.”
“The United Peoples of Andalusia claim responsibility. We further pledge a direct attack on the sailors themselves and all American armed forces until Cuba is returned to its rightful owners, the people of España. Good-bye.”
“Wait, wait. The sailors. Tell me about the attack on the—”
“By the time I hang up this phone, they will already be dead.”
She hung up, looked at Joe.
“That should get things moving,” he said.
Joe got back there in time to see them run the convoy trucks down the pier. The crew came off in groups of about fifty, moving fast, eyes scanning the rooftops.
The convoy trucks barreled off the pier one after another and then immediately split up, each truck carrying about twenty sailors, the first one heading east, the next heading southwest, the next north, and so on.
“You see any sign of Manny?” Joe asked Dion.
Dion gave him a grim nod and pointed, and Joe looked through the crowd and past the crates of weapons. There,
on the edge of the pier, lay a canvas body bag tied off at the legs, the chest, and the neck. After a while, a white van arrived and picked up the corpse and drove it off the pier with a Shore Patrol escort.
Not long after that, the last convoy truck on the pier rumbled to life. It made a U-turn, then stopped, its gears grinding with the high pitch of gulls, and then it backed up to the crates. A sailor hopped out and opened its rear gate. The few sailors left on the USS Mercy started filing off then, all carrying BARs and most wearing sidearms. A chief warrant officer waited on the pier for them as they mustered by the gangplank.
Sal Urso, who worked in the central office of the Pescatore sports book in South Tampa, sidled up and handed Dion some keys.
Dion introduced him to Joe, and they shook hands.
Sal said, “She’s about twenty yards behind us. Full tank of gas, uniforms on the seat.” He looked Dion up and down. “You weren’t an easy fit, mister.”
Dion slapped the side of his head but not too hard. “What’s it like out there?”
“The laws are everywhere. They’re looking for Spaniards, though.”
“Not Cubans?”
Sal shook his head. “You got this city riled up, son.”
The last of the sailors had mustered and the chief was giving them orders, pointing at the crates.
“Time to move,” Joe said. “Good to meet you, Sal.”
“You too, sir. I’ll see you there.”
They left the edge of the crowd and found the truck where Sal had said it would be. It was a two-ton flatbed with a steel bed and steel roll bars covered by a canvas tarp. They hopped up front, and Joe ground the shifter into first and they lurched out onto Nineteenth Street.
Twenty minutes later, they pulled over along the side of Route 41. There was a forest here, longleaf pines taller than Joe had imagined a tree could get and smaller slash and pond pines, all rising from a thick warren of overgrown palmetto and briars and scrub oak. By the smell of it, he guessed a swamp lay somewhere just east of them. Graciela was waiting for them by a tree that had snapped in half during a recent storm. She’d changed the dress she’d been wearing for a gaudy black net evening gown with zigzag hem. Imitation gold seed beads, black sequins, and a low neckline that exposed her cleavage and the edges of her brassiere cups completed the impression of a party girl who’d stayed out well past the end of the party and drifted, in the light of day, into a much crueler place.
Joe looked at her through the windshield and didn’t get out of the truck. He could hear his own breathing.
“I can do it for you,” Dion said.
“No,” Joe said. “My plan, my responsibility.”
“You got no problem delegating other things.”
He turned and looked at Dion. “You saying I want to do this?”
“I seen the way you look at each other.” Dion shrugged. “Maybe she likes it rough. Maybe you do too.”
“What the fuck are you talking about—the way we look at each other? You keep your eyes on your work, not on her.”
“All due respect,” Dion said, “you too.”
Shit, Joe thought, as soon as a guy felt sure you weren’t going to kill him, he sassed you.
Joe got out of the truck and Graciela watched him come. She’d already done some of the work herself—there was a tear in her dress by her left shoulder blade and light scratches on her left breast and she’d bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. As he approached, she dabbed at it with a handkerchief.
Dion got out of the truck on his side and they both looked over at him. He held up the uniform Sal Urso had left on the seat for him.
“Go about your business,” Dion said. “I’m gonna change.” He chuckled and walked to the back of the truck.
Graciela held out her right arm. “You don’t have much time.”
Suddenly Joe didn’t know how to take someone’s hand. It seemed unnatural.
“You don’t,” she said.
He reached out, took her hand in his. It was harder than any woman’s hand he’d ever touched. The heels of the palm were rocks from rolling cigars all day, the slim fingers as strong as ivory.
“Now?” he asked her.
“Now would be best,” she said.
He gripped her wrist with his left hand and curled the fingers of his right into the flesh by her shoulder. He pulled his nails down her arm. At the elbow he broke off and took a breath because his head felt like it was filled with wet newspaper.
She snatched her wrist out of his grip and looked at the scratches on her arm. “You have to make them look real.”
“They look plenty real.”
She pointed at her biceps. “They’re pink. And they stop at the elbow. They need to bleed, bobo niño, and go down to my hand. Yes? You remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Joe said. “It’s my plan.”
“Then act like it.” She thrust her arm at him. “Dig and pull.”
Joe wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard laughter coming from the back of the truck. He wrapped his hand firmly around her bicep this time and his fingernails sank into the faint tracks he’d already laid. Graciela wasn’t quite as brave as her talk. Her eyes wiggled in their sockets and her flesh quivered.
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Hurry, hurry.”
She locked eyes with him and he pulled his hand down the inside of her arm, stripping the skin as he went, opening the seams in her flesh. As he continued on past her elbow, she hissed and turned her arm so that his nails plowed along her forearm and ended at her wrist.
When he dropped her hand, she slapped him with it.
“Christ,” he said, “I’m not doing it because I like it.”
“So you claim.” She slapped him again, this time across the lower jaw and the top of his neck.
“Hey! I can’t pull up to a fucking guard shack with welts all over my face.”
“Then you better stop me,” she said and swung for him again.
He sidestepped this one because she’d telegraphed it for him and then he did what they’d agreed on—what had certainly seemed easier to discuss than to do until she’d hit him twice to get his blood up. The back of his hand connected with her cheek, all knuckle. Her upper body snapped to the side and her hair covered her face and she stayed that way for a moment, breathing hard. When she righted herself, her face had turned red and the skin around her right eye twitched. She spit into the palmetto bush on the side of the road.
She wouldn’t look at him. “I have it from here.”
He wanted to say something but he couldn’t think of what, so he walked around the front of the truck, Dion watching him from the passenger seat. He stopped as he opened the door and looked back at her. “I hated doing that.”
“And yet,” she said and spit onto the road, “it was your plan.”
On the road, Dion said, “Hey, I don’t like hitting ’em either but sometimes it’s all a dame respects.”
“I didn’t hit her because she had it coming,” Joe said.
“No, you hit her to help her get her hands on a bunch of BARs and Thompsons to send back to all her little friends on Sin Island.” Dion shrugged. “It’s a shitty business, so we do shitty things. She asked you to get the guns. You came up with a way to get them.”
“Ain’t got ’em yet,” Joe said.
They pulled to the side of the road one last time for Joe to change into his uniform. Dion rapped his hand on the wall between the cab and the back of the truck and said, “Everybody be as quiet as cats when the dogs are around. ¿Comprende?”
From the back of the truck came a chorus of “Sí,” and then the only thing they could hear were the ever-present insects in the trees.
“You ready?” Joe said.
Dion slapped the side of the door. “Why I get up every morning, chum.”
The National Guard Armory was way up in unincorporated Tampa, at the northern edge of Hillsborough County, a harsh landscape of citrus groves and cypress swamps and broom sage fields gone dry and brittle in the sun, waiting for the chance to burn and turn the whole county black with the smoke.
Two guards manned the gate, one armed with a Colt .45, the other with a Browning automatic rifle, the very items they’d come to steal. The guard with the sidearm was tall and lanky with dark spiky hair and the sunken cheeks of a very old man or a very young man with bad teeth. The boy with the BAR was barely out of diapers; he had burnt orange hair and dull eyes. Black pimples covered his face like pepper.
He was no problem, but the lanky one worried Joe. Something about him was too coiled and too keen. He took his time when he looked at you and he didn’t care what you thought about it.
“You the ones got blowed up?” His teeth, as Joe had guessed, were gray and slanted, several tipping back into his mouth like old headstones in a flooded graveyard.
Dion nodded. “Put a hole in our hull.”
The lanky boy looked past Joe at Dion. “Shit, tubby, how much you pay to pass your last FITREP?”
The short one left the shack with his BAR cradled lazily in his arm, the barrel slanting across his hip. He started down the side of the truck, his mouth half open like he was hoping it would rain.
The one by the door said, “I asked you a question, tubby.”
Dion smiled pleasantly. “Fifty bucks.”
“That what you paid?”
“Yep,” Dion said.
“Got yourself a bargain. And who was that you paid, exactly?”
“What’s that?”
“Name and rank of the man you paid,” the boy said.
“Chief Petty Officer Brogan,” Dion said. “Why, you thinking of joining?”
The guy blinked and gave them both a cold smile but said nothing, just stood there while the smile evaporated. “Don’t accept bribes myself.”
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