“Ya see,” he rambled, “what I would say is that in the great majority of situations such as this, the better or let’s say the smarter move or strategy is to keep your options open. If you whack this guy, and I’m not saying you would not be well within your rights to do so if this Nicky guy is on the level and not jerking you around and making us all look like idiots, well, that would be a hard thing to undo if, say, it turns out that Charlie here did not in fact do or say the things that have been, whaddyacallit, attributed to him. This could be an occasion for remorse that comes too late. Then again, I guess remorse always comes too late, which is why they call it remorse.”
“I told you to shut up,” Benavides said.
Bert didn’t. “But wait, here’s maybe an even better reason not to ice him right now, given the circumstance or let’s say reality that you can always ice him later. Nicky is expecting him to show up at the houseboat. If he doesn’t show up or shows up dead, maybe Nicky panics and doesn’t do the rendezvous and doesn’t lead you to whatever it is you’re so worked up about getting your hands on.”
That gave Benavides pause and he lowered the gun just an inch or two.
Bert didn’t wait around for much silence to creep in. “Which, by the way,” he said, “what is it?”
Flummoxed by the grammar, the Cuban boss said, “What is what?”
“This thing you’re ready to splatter brains about. What makes it worth all this? What the hell is it, anyway?”
At that, an odd change came over Benavides. He seemed for the moment to lose interest in Ponte, and his sallow, concave face took on the snarling pout of a conceited adolescent who imagines he is unique and alone in his torments and his grievances and is therefore worthy of an outsized destiny. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“Try me.”
The Cuban gave his head a little shake. “No one could understand unless they really knew Havana.”
Bert said, “So happens I know Havana pretty well. Used to, at least. Old days, used to go there all the time. I’m talkin’ late ‘40s, early ‘50s.”
The young Benavides gaped as if he was looking at a specter from some impossibly distant era, a visitor from Eden. “So you knew the Hotel Nacional?”
“Of course I knew the Nacional. Everybody did. It’s where we drank and whored and gambled. Heard great bands. It was the place. Big gangster named Meyer Lansky owned it.”
“No, he didn’t,” Benavides said with quiet but clenched assurance. “Lansky ran it. He brought in the high rollers from the States. He didn’t own it.”
Bert kept his mouth shut. No point arguing with someone else’s history.
“Batista owned it,” Benavides went on. “Together with a few of his most trusted friends. One of them was my great-grandfather. When the Revolution was heating up, when Castro started getting close, the others, one by one, began to lose their nerve. They wanted out. My great-grandfather bought their shares. Finally, Batista fled and needed cash. He was bought out, too. My great-grandfather owned the whole hotel, the casino, the land. He was the richest man in Cuba.”
Bert said softly, “Until Castro made the Nacional his headquarters.”
“Until Castro stole the Nacional,” said Benavides bitterly. “Stole it without even the pretense of a sale or a deed. Except there was a deed—my great-grandfather’s. The only legal record. Hidden away all these years, until Castro finally died, until the island was set to open up—“
Bert said, “So wait a second. This treasure of yours—it’s the deed to the Nacional?”
Benavides smoothed the front of his guayabera to underscore the grave dignity of his answer. “That’s right. I own it. Not just me. My family. A family that was robbed of all it had. And is now about to get it back, to be recognized as the leading family of a new Cuba.” He paused, and finally, some of his fury spent in telling the story, he lowered the gun away from Charlie Ponte’s forehead. “So, now do you understand?”
Bert the Shirt could hold a stare about as well as any man alive, but when Benavides spoke those words he found that he could no longer look the young man in the eye. His gaze drifted off through the glaring windshield of the Jag, and with something that might have been real sadness in his voice, he said, “Yeah, now I understand.”
40.
The campfire in the clearing had burned down to a small pile of glowing coals that brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed, as though the fire had a heartbeat of its own. It was 10:30. Nicky was fiddling with his guitar, not playing songs, just chords with little runs and riffs between, enough to keep his fingers occupied. Pineapple was whittling; Fred and Ozzie were drinking beer; Phoebe was sitting on a coral rock and tracing out the patterns on her tattooed arms. No one wanted to be the first to sound afraid and so nobody spoke.
Finally Nicky leaned the guitar against the side of the Sno-Cone truck and said, “Well, I guess it’s time.”
He glanced over at Ozzie, but Ozzie didn’t stand up right away. His legs didn’t seem to want to carry him where they’d be going.
Phoebe jumped to her feet without realizing she was doing it. “I’m going with you,” she said.
Nicky shook his head. “Feeb, we’ve been through all this. That’s not the plan.”
“So we’ll change the plan.”
Ignoring that, Nicky said, “You need to watch from the seawall. See when we come into the channel, when to call the inside guy. The timing’s crucial. That’s the plan.”
“Watch from the seawall,” Phoebe echoed. “Why? ‘Cause I’m the girl?”
“Not ‘cause you’re the girl,” said Nicky. “Because…because…” He looked at her sideways. Her eyelashes threw long and wispy shadows up across her forehead and her eyebrow stud twinkled like a star. “Because if you got hurt and it was my fault I’d have to kill myself. How’s that?”
Phoebe said nothing.
Ozzie said, “Come on, man, you can do better.”
Except he couldn’t. Not just then. Not in words. He stepped over to where Phoebe was standing and lightly touched her blue hair with his damaged fingers. Then he and Ozzie went off on their bicycles to meet a pack of killers.
The raft that Fred had cobbled together didn’t float, exactly, but subsided to a state of equilibrium just a fraction of an inch below the surface and wallowed there. A thin layer of sea water slid back and forth across the planks, and Piney had to hold the bedrolls in his arms to keep them dry while Fred used a rusty shovel as a paddle. There was a third body on the raft, though it didn’t add much weight. Phoebe had jumped on as the makeshift craft was being launched beyond the seawall, and she absolutely refused to budge. There was no way she was getting left behind.
In Cow Key Channel the tide was coursing inward from the ocean to the Gulf, and Fred labored against a current that kept nudging the raft north toward the bridge. The little platform wobbled and spun, wavelets slapping against the boards and squirting through the gaps between them, until it finally pulled even with the low islet where the Mariposa had been scuttled. The dead cruiser looked oddly peaceful and at home where it sat against the bottom. Moonlit water sluiced prettily around the smooth curve of its tilted hull. Egrets and pelicans were already using its rails and roof as places to rest and look around and hunt for tiny fish.
Fred maneuvered to the far side of the islet and the three friends jumped overboard into knee-high water and waded ashore through muck, slapping aside the grasping twigs of baby mangroves. Ten steps farther on they found a dry place big enough to spread a blanket and hunkered down to wait.
Nicky and Ozzie clambered up the gangplank of the Sea Queen. They stepped across the salt-crusted Astroturf deck, swung open the door with the busted hinges, and switched on a light in the cabin. In its stark and sudden yellow gleam they saw, still and spooky as a theatrical tableau in the instant before the players come to life, four men, two of whom were pointing guns. One of them was enormous and wore a metallic silver jacket. The other had a long, sallow face and a rema
rkably crisp crease in his trousers. He said, “Welcome aboard. You must be the famous Nicky.”
It wasn’t the first time in his life that Nicky had had a gun pointed at him but it was the first time in many years. By an old reflex he raised his hands above his head. “That’d be me.” He blinked around the wrecked interior and said, “Hello, Mr. Ponte. Hello, Bert. I wasn’t expecting the party to start this soon. Or to be this big.”
“I’ll bet you weren’t,” Benavides said. “Didn’t think the spick would be around, huh?”
Ponte said a little desperately, “Luis, I told you I never said that. Will you look at this fucking guy. A bum. Couldn’t even make it as a low-rent tough guy in Philly. Now he’s trying to mess with Charlie Ponte. Tell the truth, Nicky. Tell him I never said that.”
Nicky shrugged, blinked, showed a cool that even Bert had to admire. “I don’t know. Is that the story now? That you never said it? That we’re all just pals? All the same to me, but I’m confused. Who’m I supposed to be working for right now.”
“You’re working for me,” said Benavides. He snarled in Ponte’s direction. “This double-dealing scumbag, he’s supposed to be working for me, too.” He wagged the gun toward Ozzie. “And who’s this other asshole?”
Ozzie tried to speak but his tongue was stuck to the top of his mouth and no words came out at first. Finally he said, “Me, I’m the only guy knows how to steer this tub.”
Benavides said, “And you’ll steer it to the Mariposa, or everybody dies.”
There was a silence after that. Then Bert spoke up. He was awfully tired and was leaning on an aching elbow against a broken counter. His exhausted chihuahua was dangling as limp in his hand as if it was a cloth toy stuffed with beans. He said, “Fair enough. But let’s say there’s a happy ending? Happy for you, I mean. Say you get your precious piece of paper. What then? We all do high-fives and go home?”
The man in the silver jacket almost smiled at that but it was less a normal smile than a tic-like and mechanical baring of the teeth.
The boss said, “I wouldn’t plan on going home.” He wagged the 9 mm in Ozzie’s direction. “Come on, captain, let’s get going.”
41.
“Ever seen a key like this?” asked Teddy Meara.
They were sitting on the deck of Gus Delios’ trawler on Stock Island, and Delios was already regretting throwing in his lot with the little red-haired man. He’d made the mistake of offering his guest a drink, and Meara had so far plowed through half a bottle of decent Scotch. As his voice got slurrier, his boasts became more grandiose and random, and Delios felt a little silly for ever believing that the supposed big score was anything more than a barroom fantasy.
“Made in Austria,” Meara bragged. “One factory in the whole wide world. Can’t be duplicated.”
Delios just grunted at that.
“And look at this little chisel,” the red-haired man went on. “Titanium. Space-age. Incredibly hard. Go ahead, try to bite it.”
Delios didn’t want to bite it. He was eating peanut butter, scooping out big twirls of it with his index finger. After each three mouthfuls he’d offer one to the pink-eyed pit bull that was sitting placidly under its master’s deeply sagging hammock.
It was almost midnight. A half-moon was darkening from yellow to a powdery orange as it slouched toward the horizon, and Delios was wondering how Meara would react if he reached out and took the booze bottle away. He was just deciding to grab it when the red-haired man’s phone rang. Before he answered it, he shot Delios a smug, I-told-you-all-along kind of look. Then he picked up the call and didn’t bother with a hello, just a tough-sounding “Yeah?”
“It’s time,” said Phoebe.
She was kneeling on the blanket on the tiny islet. She and Pineapple and Fred had been arrayed in an outward-facing triangle, peering in all directions through the waxy and overlapping mangrove foliage like the last three ragged holdouts from some forgotten jungle war. It was Piney who’d first spotted the listing, lumbering Sea Queen as it labored through the shallows and came around the point beyond the airport.
“You ready?” she went on.
“Sure we’re ready,” Meara said.
“Cow Key Channel,” Phoebe told him.
“Where the fuck is that?”
“Gus Delios will know. There’s a scrubby little island in the middle of it. Your payday’s on a half-sunk wreck butted up against the island. Transom’s painted red. Can’t miss it. You with me so far?”
“Sure, sure. Easy.”
“There’ll be a crappy old houseboat hanging around just a little ways away. Nicky’s on that boat. You’ll deliver the goods to him. Got it?”
“Yeah. Easy. Fine. What about my money?”
“Don’t worry about the money,” Phoebe said. “You’ll get what you’ve earned. I promise.”
“That’s the Mariposa?” Benavides said, as Ozzie bobbed closer with the current in the channel. “Shit, we must have driven past it three, four times today.”
“Guess they look different when they’re bashed in and sunk,” Bert observed.
Benavides barely heard the comment. All his attention was now riveted on the wreck that sat serenely on the bottom a couple of hundred yards ahead of him. Just a wreck like hundreds of others scattered and forgotten in the Florida Keys, except that this one held the Benavides family’s past and future, the promised birthright that Luis had heard about in bedtime stories and in ferocious conversations in exile cafes. He was finally about to claim it, finally about to hold it in his hand.
“Faster, dammit!” he said to Ozzie, as the unaccustomed skipper tried to pick his way among the rocks and coral heads. “Get me closer!”
So focused was Benavides on the prize in front of him that he didn’t immediately notice the trawler that just then emerged from the cut at Stock Island and was banking steeply toward the channel, sending forth a wide wake that wobbled on the moonlit water.
“Come on!” commanded the young boss, whose crescent features had taken on the waxen fixity of a person obsessed. “Get me there!”
Ozzie nudged the throttle and the tired old Sea Queen plowed on a tiny bit faster. Not nearly as fast as the careening trawler. Benavides paid no attention to the other boat. Nor did he notice the quick and furtive glance that passed between Nicky and Ozzie when the houseboat was still fifty yards shy of its goal. Catching the sign, Ozzie twitched the wheel; the rudder pivoted with its festoons of seaweed, and the hull skated gently and with an almost musical scraping sound onto a shelf of submerged rock.
The landing was so soft that it seemed to take a heartbeat before Benavides realized they weren’t moving forward anymore. Then he cursed. He screamed. He wagged his gun at Ozzie. But his increasingly deranged gaze never left the Mariposa. He stared at it as if he could will it closer with the sheer force of his desire. Through clenched teeth, he said to the man at the wheel, “Get me there, you asshole!”
Ozzie pretended to be working very hard to get the houseboat unstuck. What he really did was give the engine a secret goose to make sure they were firmly aground.
Then Nicky sidled close to Benavides and said very quietly, “What’s the hurry?”
The casual tone pushed the young boss closer to the edge. His long face flushed. It didn’t flush pink but rather an unwholesome jaundiced orange.
Before he could find words, Nicky went on. “No need to rush. No reason to get wet, even. We got someone else for that.”
He gestured across the channel toward the trawler, which now had come down off of plane and was scudding silently toward the Mariposa. “There’s your inside guy.”
Benavides stayed silent.
“Or should I say Mr. Ponte’s inside guy?”
“You lying son of a bitch!” said Ponte. He tried to take a step toward Nicky but the man in the silver jacket slid quickly sideways and stood between them like a tree.
“He’ll make the grab,” Nicky went on calmly. “Then he’ll deliver it. But not to you.
To me and Mr. Ponte. That’s the plan. Sorry, but your guy’s been bought—“
“Bullshit!” Ponte said. “Total bullshit.”
Nicky managed an indulgent little smile. “Look, what’s the point of arguing? You want to get your payload? You want to be sure who’s screwing you? All we gotta do is sit tight a couple minutes. We chill, we let the inside guy do his job, you and your bruiser settle your differences with Mr. Ponte. Whaddya say?”
42.
The trawler’s engines tilted up with a confident electric whir and the shallow-bottomed craft glided the last few feet until its bow clunked softly and with a gentle rebound against the Mariposa’s half-sunk, spongy stern. Teddy Meara, somewhere between tingling and numb with alcohol, struggled for balance as he looped a line around a cleat to tie the two boats together. Then he swung a leg over a railing and climbed onto the wreck.
The back deck of the Mariposa was awash in slimy water that was warm from the processes of tiny things decaying; the slime seeped instantly through Meara’s shoes. He sloshed into the main cabin, whose floor was spangled with broken glass, and crouched beneath the hard creases where the roof had been stove in.
He had to crawl into the forepeak through a slow ooze of viscous liquid that trickled in from a gash in the hull. The liquid smelled of sulfur and of anchovies kept too long in tin. The forepeak was very dark, lit only by the wan moonlight that filtered through a single salt-smeared porthole. There was also something else that was very different from the last time Meara had been inside the forepeak: There were now no neat piles of cigar boxes to guide him to the trick panel and the safe. He cursed about that, but the curse was meant to hide the fact that he was on the verge of panic. The narrowness of the forepeak was squeezing down on him. The rank smells were stinging his nostrils and turning his stomach. The darkness and the tilted floor made him feel like he was falling down a shaft. His hands blindly groped against the beveled boards, futilely searching for a seam. He took out the small chisel and began scratching and scraping at the paneling.
Key West Luck Page 17
