Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

  “Eleven-five,” Dion said. “And we’ve more than quadrupled.”

  “So why fuck up a good thing? I don’t buy Maso’s ‘Joseph, you’re like a son to me’ bullshit any more than you do. But he respects the numbers. And our numbers are first-rate.”

  Dion nodded. “I agree it makes no sense to take us out. But I don’t like these signs. I don’t like how they make my stomach feel.”

  “That’s the paella you ate last night.”

  Dion gave him a weak smile. “Sure. Maybe that’s it.”

  Joe stood. He parted the blinds and looked out on the factory floor. Dion was worried, but Dion was paid to worry. So he was doing his job. In the end, Joe knew, everyone in this business did what they did to make the most money they could make. Simple as that. And Joe made money. Bags and bags of it that went up the seaboard with the bottles of rum and filled the safe in Maso’s mansion in Nahant. Every year Joe made more than he had the year before. Maso was ruthless and he’d grown a bit less predictable as his health declined. But he was, above all else, greedy. And Joe fed that greed. He kept its stomach warm and full. There was no logical reason Maso would risk going hungry again to replace Joe. And why replace Joe? He’d committed no transgressions. He didn’t skim off the top. He posed no threat to Maso’s power.

  Joe turned from the window. “Do whatever you have to do to guarantee my safety at that meeting.”

  “I can’t guarantee your safety at the meeting,” Dion said. “That’s my problem with it. He’s got you walking into a building where he’s bought up every room. They’re probably sweeping the place right now, so I can’t get any soldiers in there, I can’t tuck any weapons anywhere, nothing. You’re going in blind. And we’ll be on the outside just as blind. If they decide you’re not walking out of that building?” Dion tapped the desktop with his index finger several times. “Then you are not walking out of that building.”

  Joe considered his friend for a long time. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “A feeling.”

  “A feeling ain’t a fact,” Joe said. “And the facts are there’s no percentage in killing me. It benefits no one.”

  “As far as you know.”

  The Romero Hotel was a ten-story redbrick building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. It catered to commercial travelers who weren’t quite important enough for their companies to put them up at the Tampa Hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotel—every room had a toilet and washbasin, and the sheets were changed every second day; room service was available in the morning and on Friday and Saturday evenings—but it wasn’t palatial by any means.

  Joe, Sal, and Lefty were met at the front door by Adamo and Gino Valocco, brothers from Calabria. Joe had known Gino in Charlestown Pen’, and they chatted as they walked through the lobby.

  “Where you living now?” Joe said.

  “Salem,” Gino said. “It’s not so bad.”

  “You settled down?”

  Gino nodded. “Found a nice Italian girl. Two kids now.”

  “Two?” Joe said. “You work fast.”

  “I like a big family. You?”

  Joe wasn’t telling a fucking gun monkey, pleasant as he could be to chat with, about his impending fatherhood. “Still thinking about it.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” Gino said. “You need the energy for when they’re young.”

  It was one of the things about the business Joe always found charming and absurd at the same time—five men walking to an elevator, four of them carrying machine guns, all of them packing handguns, two of them asking each other about the wife and kids.

  At the elevator, Joe kept Gino talking about his kids a bit more as he tried to catch a whiff of ambush odor. Once they climbed in that elevator, any illusions they had of an exit route ended.

  But that’s all they were—illusions. The moment they’d walked through the front door, they’d given up their freedom. Given up their lives if Maso, for some demented motive Joe couldn’t fathom, wanted to end them. The elevator was just the smaller box within the bigger box. But the fact that they were in a box was impossible to argue.

  Maybe Dion was right.

  And maybe Dion was wrong.

  Only one way to find out.

  They left the Valocco brothers and got in the elevator. The operator was Ilario Nobile, permanently gaunt and yellowed by hep’, but a magician with a gun. They said he could put a rifle shot through a flea’s ass during a solar eclipse and could sign his name on a windowsill with a Thompson and not chip a pane of glass.

  As they rode up to the top floor, Joe chatted with Ilario as easily as he had with Gino Valocco. In Ilario’s case, the trick was to talk about the man’s dogs. He bred beagles out of his home in Revere and was known to produce dogs of gentle temperament and the softest ears.

  But as they rose in the car, Joe wondered again if maybe Dion had been onto something. The Valocco brothers and Ilario Nobile were all known gunners. They weren’t muscle and they weren’t brains. They were killers.

  In the tenth-floor hallway, though, the only other person waiting for them was Fausto Scarfone, another artisan with a weapon to be sure, but it was him and only him, which left an even match to wait in the corridor—two of Maso’s guys, two of Joe’s.

  Maso himself opened the doors to the Gasparilla Suite, the nicest suite in the hotel. He hugged Joe and took both sides of his face in his hands when he kissed his forehead. He hugged him again and patted him hard on the back.

  “How are you, my son?”

  “I’m very good, Mr. Pescatore. Thanks for asking.”

  “Fausto, see if his men need anything.”

  “Take their rods, Mr. Pescatore?”

  Maso frowned. “Of course not. You gentlemen make yourselves comfortable. We shouldn’t be too long.” Maso pointed at Fausto. “Anyone wants a sandwich or something, you call room service. Anything these boys want.”

  He led Joe into the suite and closed the doors behind them. One set of windows looked out on an alley and the yellow brick building next door, a piano manufacturer who’d gone belly-up in ’29. All that remained was his name, HORACE R. PORTER, fading on the brick, and a bunch of boarded-up windows. The other windows, though, looked out on nothing that would remind guests of the Depression. They overlooked Ybor and the channels that led out to Hillsborough Bay.

  In the center of the living area four armchairs were arranged around an oak coffee table. A sterling silver coffeepot and matching creamer and sugar bowl sat in the center. So did a bottle of anisette and three small glasses of it, already poured. Maso’s middle son, Santo, sat waiting for them, looking up at Joe as he poured himself a cup of coffee and placed the cup down beside an orange.

  Santo Pescatore was thirty-one and everyone called him Digger, though no one could remember why, not even Santo himself.

  “You remember Joe, Santo.”

  “I dunno. Maybe.” He half rose from his chair and gave Joe a limp, damp handshake. “Call me Digger.”

  “Good to see you again.” Joe took a seat across from him, and Maso came around, took the seat beside his son.

  Digger peeled the orange, tossing the peels onto the coffee table. He wore a permanent scowl of confused suspicion on his long face, like he’d just heard a joke he didn’t get. He had curly dark hair that was thinning up front, a fleshy chin and neck, and his father’s eyes, dark and small as sharpened pencil points. There was something dulled about him, though. He didn’t have his father’s charm or cunning because he’d never needed to.

  Maso poured Joe a cup of coffee and handed it across the table. “How’ve you been?”

  “Very good, sir. You?”

  Maso tipped a hand back and forth. “Good days and bad.”

  “I hope more good than bad.”

  Maso raised a glass of the anisette to that. “So far, so far. S
alud.”

  Joe raised a glass. “Salud.”

  Maso and Joe drank. Digger popped an orange slice in his mouth and chewed with his mouth open.

  Joe was reminded, not for the first time, that for such a violent business, it was filled with a surprising number of regular guys—men who loved their wives, who took their children on Saturday-afternoon outings, men who worked on their automobiles and told jokes at the neighborhood lunch counter and worried what their mothers thought of them and went to church to ask God’s forgiveness for all the terrible things they had to render unto Caesar in order to put food on the table.

  But it was also a business that was populated by an equal number of pigs. Vicious oafs whose primary talent was that they felt no more for their fellow man than they did for a fly sputtering on the windowsill at summer’s end.

  Digger Pescatore was one of the latter. And like so many of the breed Joe had come across, he was the son of a founding father of this thing they all found themselves entwined with, grafted to, subjects of.

  Over the years Joe had met all three of Maso’s sons. He’d met Tim Hickey’s only boy, Buddy. He’d met the sons of Cianci in Miami, Barrone in Chicago, and DiGiacomo in New Orleans. The fathers were fearsomely self-made creatures, one and all. Men of iron will and some vision and not even a passing acquaintance with sympathy. But men, unquestionably men.

  And every one of their sons, Joe thought as the sound of Digger’s chewing filled the room, was a fucking embarrassment to the human race.

  As Digger ate his orange and then a second one, Maso and Joe discussed Maso’s trip down, the heat, Graciela, and the baby on the way.

  After those topics had been exhausted, Maso produced a newspaper that had been tucked into the seat beside him. He took the bottle around the table and sat beside Joe. He poured two more drinks and opened the Tampa Tribune. Loretta Figgis’s face stared back at them under the headline:

  DEATH OF A MADONNA

  He said to Joe, “This the filly who caused us all the trouble on the casino?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Why didn’t you clip her then?”

  “Would’ve been too much blowback. The whole state was watching.”

  Maso tore an orange slice free of the peel. “That’s true but that’s not why.”

  “No?”

  Maso shook his head. “Why didn’t you kill the ’shiner like I told you back in ’32?”

  “Turner John?”

  Maso nodded.

  “Because we came to an accommodation.”

  Maso shook his head. “You weren’t ordered to accommodate. You were ordered to kill the son of a bitch. And the reason you didn’t was the same reason you didn’t kill this puttana pazzo—because you’re not a killer, Joseph. Which is a problem.”

  “It is? Since when?”

  “Since now. You’re not a gangster.”

  “Trying to hurt my feelings, Maso?”

  “You’re an outlaw, a bandit in a suit. And now I hear you’re thinking of going legitimate?”

  “Thinking about it.”

  “So you won’t mind if I replace you down here?”

  Joe smiled for some reason. Chuckled. He found his cigarettes and lit one.

  “When I got here, Maso? This outfit grossed a million a year.”

  “I know.”

  “Since I got here? We’ve averaged almost eleven million.”

  “Mostly because of the rum, though. Those days are ending. You’ve neglected the girls and the narcotics.”

  “Bullshit,” Joe said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I concentrated on the rum because, yeah, it was most profitable. But our narcotic sales are up sixty-five percent. As for the girls, we added four houses in my time here.”

  “But you could have added more. And the whores claim they’re rarely beaten.”

  Joe found himself looking down at the table into Loretta’s face, then looking up, then looking back down again. It was his turn to exhale a loud breath. “Maso, I—”

  “Mr. Pescatore,” Maso said.

  Joe said nothing.

  “Joseph,” Maso said, “our friend Charlie wants to make some changes to the way we run our thing.”

  “Our friend Charlie” was Lucky Luciano out of New York. King, essentially. Emperor for Life.

  “What changes?”

  “Considering Lucky’s right hand is a kike, the changes are a bit ironic, even unfair. I won’t lie to you.”

  Joe gave Maso a tight smile and waited for the old man to get to it.

  “Charlie wants Italians, and only Italians, in the top slots.”

  Maso wasn’t kidding—it was the height of irony. Everyone knew that no matter how smart Lucky was—and he was smart as hell—he was nothing without Meyer Lansky. Lansky, a Jew from the Lower East Side, had done more than anyone in this thing of theirs to turn a collection of mom-and-pop shops into a corporation.

  The thing was, though, Joe had no desire to reach the top. He was happy with his small local operation.

  He said as much now to Maso.

  “You’re far too modest,” Maso said.

  “I’m not. I run Ybor. And the rum, yeah, but that’s over, like you said.”

  “You run a lot more than Ybor and a lot more than Tampa, Joseph. Everyone knows that. You run the Gulf Coast from here to Biloxi. You run the out routes from here to Jacksonville and half the ones that head north. I’ve been through the books. You’ve made us a force down here.”

  Instead of saying And this is how you thank me? Joe said, “So if I can’t be in charge because Charlie says ‘No Irish need apply,’ what can I be?”

  “What I tell you to.” This from Digger, finished with his second orange, wiping his sticky palms on the sides of the armchair.

  Maso gave Joe a don’t-mind-him look and said, “Consigliere. You stay with Digger and teach him the ropes, introduce him to people around town, maybe teach him how to golf or fish.”

  Digger fixed Joe in his tiny eyes. “I know how to shave and tie my shoes.”

  Joe wanted to say, But you have to think about it, don’t you?

  Maso patted Joe’s knee once. “You’ll have to take a little haircut, financially speaking. But don’t worry, we’re going to muscle the port this summer, take the whole fucking thing over, and there’ll be plenty of work, I promise.”

  Joe nodded. “What kind of haircut?”

  Maso said, “Digger takes over your cut. You assemble a crew and keep whatever you make, less tribute.”

  Joe looked at the windows. He looked out at the ones overlooking the alley for a moment. Then the ones overlooking the bay. He counted down slowly from ten. “You’re demoting me to crew boss?”

  Maso patted his knee again. “It’s a realignment, Joseph. On Charlie Luciano’s orders.”

  “Charlie said, ‘Replace Joe Coughlin in Tampa.’ ”

  “Charlie said, ‘No non-Italians at the top.’ ” Maso’s voice was still smooth, kindly even, but Joe could hear a bit of frustration creeping in.

  Joe took a moment to keep his own voice in check because he knew how fast Maso could drop the courtly old gentleman mask and reveal the savage cannibal behind it.

  “Maso, I think Digger wearing the crown is a great idea. The two of us together? We’ll take over the state, take over Cuba while we’re at it. I have the connections to do that. But my cut needs to stay close to what it is now. I step down to crew boss? I’ll make maybe a tenth of what I’m making now. And I gotta make my monthly nut on—what?—shaking down longshoremen unions and cigar factory owners? There’s no power there.”

  “Maybe that’s the point.” Digger smiled for the first time, a piece of orange stuck in his upper teeth. “You ever think of that, smart guy?”

  Joe looked at Maso.

 
Maso stared back at him.

  Joe said, “I built this.”

  Maso nodded.

  Joe said, “I pulled ten-eleven times out of this city what Lou Ormino was fucking making for you.”

  “Because I let you,” Maso said.

  “Because you needed me.”

  “Hey, smart guy,” Digger said, “nobody needs you.”

  Maso patted the air between him and his son, the kind of calming gesture you used on a dog. Digger sat back in his chair, and Maso turned to Joe. “We could use you, Joseph. We could. But I am sensing a lack of gratitude.”

  “So am I.”

  This time Maso’s hand settled on his knee and squeezed. “You work for me. Not for yourself, not for the spics or the niggers you surround yourself with. If I tell you to go clean the shit out of my toilet, guess what you’re going to do?” He smiled, his voice as soft as ever. “I’ll kill your cunt girlfriend and burn your house to embers if I feel like it. You know this, Joseph. Your eyes got a little big for your head down here, that’s all. I’ve seen it happen before.” He raised the hand from Joe’s knee and patted Joe’s face with it. “So, do you want to be a crew boss? Or do you want to clean the shit out of my toilets on diarrhea day? I’m accepting applications for both.”

  If Joe played ball, he’d have a few days’ head start to talk to all his contacts, marshal his forces, and align the chess pieces correctly. While Maso and his guns were back on the train heading north, Joe would fly up to New York, talk to Luciano directly, put a balance sheet on his desk and show him what Joe would make him versus what a retard like Digger Pescatore would lose him. There was an excellent chance Lucky would see the light and they could move past this with minimal bloodshed.

  “Crew boss,” Joe said.

  “Ah,” Maso said with a broad smile, “my boy.” He pinched Joe’s cheeks. “My boy.”

  When Maso got out of his chair, Joe did too. They shook hands. They hugged. Maso kissed both his cheeks in the same spots where he’d pinched them.

  Joe shook hands with Digger and told him how much he looked forward to working with him.

  “For,” Digger reminded him.

  “Right,” Joe said. “For you.”