The other night, he and Graciela had gone out for drinks at the Riviera and dinner at the Columbia and then caught a show at the Satin Sky. They’d been accompanied by Sal Urso, who was Joe’s full-time driver now, and their car was shadowed by Lefty Downer, who watched them when Dion was dealing with other matters. The bartender at the Riviera had tripped and fallen to one knee trying to get Graciela’s chair pulled out for her before she arrived at the table. When the waitress at the Columbia spilled a drink on the table and some of it leaked onto Joe’s pants, the maître d’, the manager, and eventually the owner had come to the table to apologize. Joe then had to convince them not to fire the waitress. He argued that her mistake was honest, and that her service was, in all other respects, impeccable and had been every time they’d been lucky to have her service their table. (Service. Joe hated that word.) The men had relented, of course, but as Graciela reminded him on their way to Satin Sky, what else would they say to Joe’s face? See if she still has a job next week, Graciela said. At the Satin Sky, the tables were all taken, but then before Joe and Graciela could turn back to the car where Sal waited, the manager, Pepe, rushed over to them and assured them that four patrons had just paid their check. Joe and Graciela watched two men approach a table of four, whisper in the ears of the couples sitting there, and hasten their exit with hands on their elbows.
At the table, neither Joe nor Graciela spoke for some time. They drank their drinks, they watched the band. Graciela looked around the room and then out at Sal standing by the car, his eyes never leaving them. She looked at the patrons and the waiters who pretended not to watch them.
She said, “I’ve become the people my parents worked for.”
Joe said nothing because every response he thought of would be a lie.
Something was getting lost in them, something that was starting to live by day, where the swells lived, where the insurance salesmen and the bankers lived, where the civic meetings were held and the little flags were waved at the Main Street parades, where you sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself.
But along the sidewalks lit by dim, yellow lamps and in the alleys and abandoned lots, people begged for food and blankets. And if you got past them, their children worked the next corner.
The reality was, he liked the story of himself. Liked it better than the truth of himself. In the truth of himself, he was second-class and grubby and always out of step. He still had his Boston accent and didn’t know how to dress right, and he thought too many thoughts that most people would find “funny.” The truth of himself was a scared little boy, mislaid by his parents like reading glasses on a Sunday afternoon, treated to random kindnesses by older brothers who came without notice and departed without warning. The truth of himself was a lonely boy in an empty house, waiting for someone to knock on his bedroom door and ask if he was okay.
The story of himself, on the other hand, was of a gangster prince. A man who had a full-time driver and bodyguard. A man of wealth and stature. A man for whom people abandoned their seats simply because he coveted them.
Graciela was right—they had become the people her parents worked for. But they were better versions. And her parents, hungry as they were, would have expected no less. You couldn’t fight the Haves. The only thing you could do was become them to such a degree that they came to you for what they had not.
He left the veranda and reentered the hotel. He turned his flashlight back on, saw the great wide room where high society had been poised to drink and eat and dance and do whatever else it was that high society did.
What else did high society do?
He couldn’t think of an answer right off.
What else did people do?
They worked. When they could find it. Even when they couldn’t, they raised families, drove their cars if they could afford the upkeep and gas. They went to movies or listened to the radio or caught a show. They smoked.
And the rich . . . ?
They gambled.
Joe could see it in a great smash of light. While the rest of the country lined up for soup and begged for spare change, the rich remained rich. And idle. And bored.
This restaurant he walked through, this restaurant that never was, wasn’t a restaurant at all. It was a casino floor. He could see the roulette wheel in the center, the craps tables over by the south wall, the card tables along the north wall. He saw a Persian carpet and crystal chandeliers with ruby and diamond pendants.
He left the room and moved down the main corridor. The conference rooms he passed became music halls—big band in one, vaudeville in another, Cuban jazz in the third, maybe even a movie theater in the fourth.
The rooms. He ran up to the fourth floor and looked at the ones overlooking the Gulf. Jesus, they were breathtaking. Every floor would have its own butler, standing at the ready when you got off the lifts. He’d be at the service of all guests on that floor twenty-four hours a day. Every room would, of course, have a radio. And a ceiling fan. And maybe those French toilets he’d heard about, ones shot water up your ass. They’d have masseuses on call, twelve hours of room service, two, no three, concierges. He walked back down to the second floor. The flashlight needed another rest, so he shut it off, because he knew the staircase now. On the second floor, he found the ballroom. It was in the center of the floor with a large viewing rotunda above it, a place to stroll on warm spring nights and watch others of bottomless wealth dance under the stars painted on the domed roof.
What he saw, clearer than any clear he’d ever known, was that the rich would come in here for the dazzle and the elegance and the chance to risk it all against a rigged game, as rigged as the one they’d been running on the poor for centuries.
And he’d indulge it. He’d encourage it. And he’d profit from it.
Nobody—not Rockefeller, not Du Pont or Carnegie or J. P. Morgan—beat the house. Unless they were the house. And in this casino, the only house was him.
He shook his flashlight several times and turned it on.
For some reason, he was surprised to find them waiting for him—RD Pruitt and two other men. RD, in a stiff tan suit and a black string tie. The cuffs of his trousers stopped just short of his black shoes, exposing the white socks underneath. He had two boys with him—’shine runners by the look of them, smelling of corn, sour mash, and methanol. No suits on these boys—just short ties on short collar shirts, wool trousers held up by suspenders.
They turned their flashlights on Joe, and it was all he could do not to blink into them.
RD said, “You came.”
“I came.”
“Where’s my brother-in-law?”
“He didn’t come.”
“Just as well.” He pointed at the boy to his right. “This here is Carver Pruitt, my cousin.” He pointed at the boy on his left. “And his cousin on his mama’s side? Harold LaBute.” He turned to them. “Boys, this here is the one killed Kelvin. Careful now, he might decide to kill you all.”
Carver Pruitt raised his rifle to his shoulder. “Not likely.”
“This one?” RD sidestepped along the ballroom, pointing at Joe. “He’s rat tricky. You take your eye off that pea shooter, I promise it’ll be in his hands.”
“Aww,” Joe said, “shucks.”
“You a man of your word?” RD asked Joe.
“Depends on who I give it to.”
“So you ain’t come alone like I ordered.”
“No,” Joe said, “I ain’t come alone.”
“Well, where they at?”
“Shit, RD, I tell you that, I spoil the fun.”
“We watched you come in,” RD said. “We been sitting out there three hours. You show up an hour early, think you get the drop on us?” He chuckled. “So we know you came alone. How you like that?”
“Trust me,” Joe said, “I’m not alone.”
RD crossed the ballroom,
and his guns followed him until they were all standing in the center.
The switchblade Joe had brought with him was already open, the base of the handle tucked lightly under the band of the wristwatch he wore solely for this occasion. All he had to do was flex his wrist and the blade would drop into his palm.
“I don’t want no sixty percent.”
“I know that,” Joe said.
“What you think I want then?”
“Don’t know,” Joe said. “I suspect? I suspect a return to, I dunno, the way things used to be? Am I warm?”
“You about on the griddle.”
“But there wasn’t no way things used to be,” Joe said. “That’s our problem, RD. I spent two years in prison doing nothing but reading. Know what I found out?”
“No. You tell me, though, won’t ya?”
“Found out we were always fucked. Always killing each other and raping and stealing and laying waste. It’s who we are, RD. Ain’t no Used to Be. Ain’t no better days.”
RD said, “Uh-huh.”
“You know what this place could be?” Joe said. “You realize what we could do with this spot?”
“I do not.”
“Build the biggest casino in the United States.”
“Ain’t nobody going to allow gambling.”
“Gotta disagree with you, RD. Whole country’s in the tank, banks going under, cities going bankrupt, people out of work.”
“ ’Cause we got us a Communist for a president.”
“No,” Joe said, “not even close, actually. But I’m not here to debate politics with you, RD. I’m here to tell you that the reason Prohibition will end is because—”
“Prohibition ain’t gonna end in a God-fearing country.”
“Yes, it will. Because the country needs all the millions it didn’t get the past ten years on tariffs and import taxes and distribution taxes and interstate transport levies and, shit, you name it—could be billions they gave away. And they’re going to ask me and people like me—you, for example—to make millions of dollars selling legal booze so we can save the country for them. And that’s exactly why, in the spirit of the moment, they’ll allow this state to legalize gambling. Long as we buy off the right county commissioners, the right city councillors and state senators. We could do that. And you could be part of it, RD.”
“I don’t want to be part of nothing with you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To tell you to your face, mister, that you’re a cancer. You’re the pestilence that gonna bring this country to its knees. You and your nigger whore girlfriend and your dirty spic friends and your dirty dago friends. I’m a take the Parisian. Not sixty percent—the whole place. Then? I’m a take all your clubs. I’m a take everything you got. Might even go by your fancy house and tear me off a piece that nigger girl ’fore I cut her throat.” He looked back at his boys and laughed. He turned to Joe again. “You ain’t got this yet, but you leaving town, boy. You just forgot to pack your bags.”
Joe looked into RD’s bright, mean eyes. Stared deep into them until he got all the way past anything bright and was left with nothing but the mean. It was like staring into the eyes of a dog beat so much and starved so much and uglied so much that all it had to give back to the world was its teeth.
In that moment, he pitied him.
RD Pruitt saw that pity in Joe’s eyes. And what surged up in his own was a howl of outrage. And a knife. Joe saw the knife coming in his eyes and by the time he glanced down at RD’s hand, he’d already buried it in Joe’s abdomen.
Joe gripped RD’s wrist, gripped it fiercely, so RD couldn’t move that knife right, left, up, or down. Joe’s own knife clattered to the floor. RD struggled against Joe’s grip, both their teeth gritted now.
“I got you,” RD said. “I got you.”
Joe removed his hands from RD’s wrist and punched the heels of his palms into the center of RD and chucked him back. The knife slid back out and Joe fell on the floor and RD laughed and the two boys with him laughed.
“Got you!” RD said and walked toward Joe.
Joe watched his own blood drip from the blade. He held up a hand. “Wait.”
RD stopped. “That’s what everyone says.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.” Joe looked up into the darkness, saw the stars on the dome above the rotunda. “Okay. Now.”
“Then who you talking to?” RD said, a step too slow, always a step too slow, which was probably what made him so ass-dumb mean.
Dion and Sal Urso turned on the searchlights they’d lugged up to the rotunda this afternoon. It was like a harvest moon popping out from behind a bank of storm clouds. The ballroom turned white.
When the bullets rained down, RD Pruitt, his cousin, Carver, and Carver’s cousin, Harold, did the bone-yard foxtrot, like they were having terrible coughing fits while running across hot coals. Dion, of late, had turned into an artist with the Thompson, and he stitched an X up one side and down the other of RD Pruitt’s body. By the time they stopped firing, scraps of the three men were flung all over the ballroom.
Joe heard their footsteps on the stairs as they ran down to him.
Dion called to Sal when they entered the ballroom, “Get the doc’, get the doc’.”
Sal’s footsteps ran the other way as Dion ran over to Joe and ripped open his shirt.
“Oooh, Nellie.”
“What? Bad?”
Dion shrugged off his coat and then tore off his own shirt. He wadded it up and pressed it to the wound. “Hold it there.”
“Bad?” Joe repeated.
“Ain’t good,” Dion said. “How do you feel?”
“Feet are cold. Stomach’s on fire. I want to scream actually.”
“Scream, then,” Dion said. “Ain’t no one else around.”
Joe did. The force of it shocked him. It echoed all over the hotel.
“Feel better?”
“You know what?” Joe said. “No.”
“Then don’t do it again. Well, he’s on his way. The doc’.”
“You bring him with you?”
Dion nodded. “He’s on the boat. Sal’s already hit the signal light by now. He’ll be motoring up to the dock lickety-split.”
“That’s good.”
“Why didn’t you make some kind of noise when he put it in? We couldn’t fucking see you up there. We just kept waiting for the signal.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “It seemed important not to give him the satisfaction. Oh, Jesus, this hurts.”
Dion gave him his hand and Joe clenched it.
“Why’d you let him get so close if you weren’t going to stab him?”
“So what?”
“So close? With the knife? You were supposed to stab him.”
“I shouldn’t have shown him those pictures, D.”
“You showed him pictures?”
“No. What? No. I mean Figgis. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Christ. That’s what we had to do to put this fucking mad dog down.”
“It’s not the right price.”
“But it’s the price. You don’t go letting this piece of shit stab you because the price is the price.”
“Okay.”
“Hey. Stay awake.”
“Stop slapping my face.”
“Stop closing your eyes.”
“It’s going to make a nice casino.”
“What?”
“Trust me,” Joe said.
Chapter Twenty
Mi Gran Amor
Five weeks.
That’s how long he spent in a hospital bed. First in the Gonzalez Clinic on Fourteenth, just up the block from the Circulo Cubano, and then, under the alias Rodriguo Martinez, at the Centro Asturiano Hospital twelve blocks east. The Cubans might have fought
with the Spaniards and the southern Spaniards might have fought with the northern Spaniards, and all of them had their beefs with the Italians and the American Negroes, but when it came to medical care, Ybor was a mutual aid collective. Everyone down there knew that no one in white Tampa would lift a finger to stop up a hole in their hearts if there was a Caucasian nearby who needed treatment for a fucking hangnail.
Joe was worked on by a team that Graciela and Esteban assembled—a Cuban surgeon who performed the original laparotomy, a Spanish specialist in thoracic medicine who oversaw the abdominal wall reconstruction during the second, third, and fourth surgeries, and an American doctor on the forefront of pharmacology who had access to the tetanus toxoid vaccine and regulated the administering of the morphine.
All the initial work done on Joe—the irrigation, cleansing, exploration, debridement, and suturing—had been done at the Gonzalez Clinic, but word slipped out he was there. Midnight riders of the KKK showed up the second night, galloping their horses up and down Ninth, the oily stench of their torches climbing through the window grates. Joe wasn’t awake for any of this—he would never have more than scant recollection of the first two weeks after the stabbing—but Graciela would tell him all about it during the months of his recovery.
When the riders departed, thundering out of Ybor along Seventh and firing their rifles in the air, Dion sent men to follow them—two men per horse. Just before dawn, unknown assailants entered the homes of eight local men across the Greater Tampa/St. Petersburg area and beat those men nearly to death, some in front of their families. When a wife intervened in Temple Terrace, they broke her arms with a bat. When a son in Egypt Lake tried to impede them, they tied the boy to a tree and let the ants and mosquitoes have at him. The most prominent of the victims, the dentist Victor Toll, was rumored to have replaced Kelvin Beauregard as the head of the town Klavern. Dr. Toll was tied to the hood of his car. He was forced to lie there in a soup of his blood and smell his own house burn to the ground.
This effectively ended the power of the Ku Klux Klan in Tampa for three years, but the Pescatore Family and the Coughlin-Suarez Gang had no way of knowing that, so they took no chances and moved Joe to the Centro Asturiano Hospital. There a surgical drain was inserted to offset the internal bleeding, the source of which mystified the original doctor, which is why they sent for the second doctor, a gentle Spaniard with the most beautiful fingers Graciela had ever seen.
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